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1X01 – Sentinel – Act III
It was about time to go and JP found himself walking down one of the halls, passing the kitchen. He heard a noise, nothing too sinister, but it was pretty late, or early, and curiosity got the better of him. Perhaps it was Bobby needing to be reminded to get a move on?
When he got in sight of the food staging area, it was covered in all manner of containers full of everything needed to make the world’s best BLT. Sitting at the island on a stool was his sister, in a low-cut t-shirt with a sparkly Union Jack, flipping through a magazine with one hand while nibbling on the sandwich with another.
“Don’t worry,” she said without looking up, “I’ll clean up my mess before I go.”
“Jeanne-Marie,” he frowned, “it’s almost three o’clock in the morning, what are you doing?”
“I felt like a late night snack,” she glanced up at him, “is that a crime?”
“No,” he frowned, not sure what to make of her, after all, she was right, there was nothing wrong with making yourself some food if you were hungry, but there was just something… off.
“You better get going,” she went back to her magazine, “the troop is leaving.”
He studied her for another long moment before deciding there was no point getting into things right now with her, especially as there was nothing to really talk about. Giving his head a slight shake, he threw his coat over his shoulder and headed to the garage.
“JP,” Jean was the first to notice he was there and she walked over to him, “I saw your sister in the kitchen, something didn’t seem right.”
“You too, huh?” he gave her a wry grin.
“I’ve only known her since you brought her here,” the red-head admitted, “but she almost seemed like a different person.”
“Yeah,” he couldn’t look her in the eyes, then she might agree with what he was thinking, “let’s talk about this when we get back.”
“Sure,” she nodded and let him walk past her, it seemed everyone had arrived.
“So, we taking two cars?” Bobby asked, the group totaled seven and were not going to fit in his Ford Escape, no matter how roomy it was.
“I can zip ahead,” JP volunteered, “start on the recon.”
“And I will fly,” Storm was wearing her special cape which helped her glide on the winds, “JP takes the ground and I will do aerial reconnaissance.”
“Good idea,” Scott agreed, “Jean will contact you when we get there.”
With a nod, Jean-Paul ran off at almost top speed, barely pausing to get through the fence, and he made his way down south to New Jersey… his sister never far from his mind.
…
Rogue wasn’t sleeping well, it didn’t take a genius to see the faint worry lines creasing around her eyes and mouth. It did take someone with super-hearing to notice that her heart beats per minute where high, especially for someone who was supposed to be asleep.
Reaching out one clawed hand, knowing Rogue couldn’t absorb through the keratin of his nails, Sabretooth lightly touched her on the nose, grinning as he watched her react.
First her left arm swept up to block the perceived attack, while her right arm reached out and grabbed him by the throat. She was wearing gloves as she napped on appropriated law furniture, so there was no risk of absorption, not that he’d let her get close enough otherwise.
“What were you dreaming, I wonder,” Sabretooth said lowly as her eyes registered him as her attacker, surprise turning into near rage, “was it that little visit to Gò Dài,” he grinned as her hand tightened, “or maybe Belgrade,” he chuckled, “so many wonderful memories to choose from.”
“You’re not a monster,” Rogue said as she let go, sitting up straight, “you’re a pathetic waste of the mutant gene,” she got into his face, “you wouldn’t even be able to hack it as a human.”
With a growl, Sabretooth punched out, slicing through the fabric of the chair as Rogue ducked to the side. As fun as it was to taunt someone who knew your secrets, it meant they also knew where your buttons were.
“Enough,” Quicksilver was right there, “we got word, the X-Men are on the move.”
“You’re sure?” Sabretooth asked with little care, annoyed that his fun was interrupted.
“Where else would they be going at near four in the morning?” the man replied dryly.
“Well then,” he let all of his claws spring free, “I think it’s time I show you kiddos how it’s done.”
Rogue sharply brought her knee up into his gut and before he could react punched him square in the jaw to push him off her and onto the floor as she hopped up, “Yeah, you do that.”
Rage boiling over, Sabretooth growled as his teeth grew as sharp as his claws. He was back on his feet in seconds, using his considerably height to stare down at the woman, Quicksilver shouting out a warning. The Southern mutant just stared up at him in defiance, and that he couldn’t stand.
He had to put her back in her place.
Leaning forward, she didn’t flinch, so he whispered, “Pleasant dreams.”
That broke her, every inch of boldness crumbling to dust. With a self-satisfied smile, he turned his back on her and walked away, laughing.
…
Bobby pulled the SUV up to about three blocks from the warehouse and the group piled out as JP appeared in front of them.
“No sign of the Brotherhood and the building has basic security,” the Canadian filled in, “two night guards, an alarm system, but that’s it.”
“Probably think of it as a low priority target,” Scott rubbed his chin, “after all, you can’t access the database without Nimrod.”
“Speaking of which,” Kitty went to the back of the Escape but as she still had her laptop in one hand and a table in the other, she used her foot to activate the automatic liftgate on the Ford Escape. Once it was up, she put her laptop down next to a backpack, unzipping it and pulling it down to show the mechanical box, “remember, Jean, the left connector, not the right.”
“And follow the prompts, yes,” the woman nodded, “I remember.”
“Easy peazy,” Kitty connected the table to Nimrod and brought up a holding screen, then put it to sleep and slipped it into the bag.
Jean grabbed the pack and slung it over her shoulder, “Ready when you are.”
“Logan,” Scott called out to the man who had walked a few feet from the vehicle and was sniffing the air in a crouched position, “any sign of the Brotherhood?”
“Not yet,” Wolverine gave a disappointed growl.
“Jean,” he turned to the woman, “you contacted Ro?”
“Yes,” Jean nodded, “she’s hovering above the building, said she’ll meet us inside.”
“Good, let’s try to make this as quick as possible,” Scott reached into his jacket pocket to pull out his visor, “who knows what kind of response we’ll get from the alarm going off.”
“I’ll see if I can hack into it from here and shut it off,” Kitty closed the liftgate with her laptop in hand, then turned to Bobby, “leave me your fob.”
“What,” he clutched it to his chest, “no! Everyone keeps thinking they can just drive my baby.”
“Oh, brother,” she made a face at him, “I might need to charge my laptop, I promise I won’t drive her.”
He frowned and looked at the fob for the keyless push-button ignition, “You promise?”
“I promise,” there was a little touch of snark to her voice.
“Okay,” he sighed and handed over the fob with a bit of a pout.
“If you can cut the alarm, then great,” Scott made sure the visor was snug on his head, “otherwise, let’s treat this as in and out, no one gets hurt, especially the guards.”
The group nodded, except for Logan who was already making his way down the sidewalk. Kitty crawled into the passenger’s seat of the Escape, laptop on her knees, and the rest of the gang followed the feral mutant down the street.
…
Not too high above the building, Ororo Munroe delicately lowered herself onto the roof of the two story converted warehouse, just out of camera range, her white irises nearly glowing in the moonlight.
“I await your arrival,” she said over the mindlink.
“We’re outside,” Jean replied, “looking for an opening.”
“Kitty,” Scott came over the link, “how are you with the alarms?”
“Almost… stupid firewall,” the girl replied, followed by a mental shriek of happiness, “I’m in, bad news is I can’t shut it off, good news though, I can keep it from getting outside the building.”
“Great job,” he answered, “Ro, trip the roof alarm, make them look up while we come in from the ground.”
“One moment,” she confirmed, then made her way to the roof exit. It wouldn’t initially open, a security punch pad barring her way.
Storm gave it a light frown, then pulled a small pocket knife from her boot. Using the edge, she popped open the cover to see the wires inside. Pursing her lips into a thin line, she quickly stripped two of the wires and crossed them over.
The door unlocked with a soft click.
“Ro?”
“Had to bypass the key pad,” she replied as she propped the door open.
“I could have gotten that for you,” it was obvious Kitty was pouting a little.
“Have to keep my skills sharp,” she smiled to herself as she closed up the knife and put it back in her boot.
“Skills?” Bobby’s voice came over.
“That’s great, Ro,” Logan drawled, “but you’re supposed to set the alarm off, not bypass it.”
“Of course,” she looked down at the key pad, grabbing one of the wires and yanking it from the rest, immediately a pulsing screech filled the halls, “force of habit.”
“Habit?!”
…
When they opened the front door of the building, there was a short hallway leading to another door. Scott turned to Wolverine but the Canadian was already running down the side of the building, taking his perimeter patrol. The rest of the team quickly walked down the hallway, Scott noting the keypad lock.
“So,” Bobby said as Scott fiddled with his visor, “no one got anything to say about our headmistress’ apparently felony inducing hobby?”
“Honestly,” Scott shot a very small beam at the panel, sparks flew out and the door popped, “I thought everyone knew about that.”
“Apparently no one tells me anything,” Bobby was frowning as they entered the foyer.
“Stop!” a man shouted, a security guard with his weapon drawn and trained on them.
Before anyone else could react, JP had appeared behind the man, one arm around his throat, nestled perfectly in the crook of his arm in order to cut off blood flow to the brain, but for only a split second.
“Nighty nite,” the Canadian speedster said as the guard passed out, his gun dropping to the floor.
“He gonna be okay?” Scott asked as JP dragged the man over to the desk which was bolted to the floor.
“He’ll wake back up in a moment,” he pulled a zip-tie from his pocket and tied him to the desk, “no harm done.”
“Good work then,” Scott knew he could trust the man but sometimes he needed that little reassurance. What they were doing was already dodgy, they couldn’t risk giving the government more reason to want to hunt them, “head back outside and do another sweep, keep an eye out for Acolytes.”
JP nodded, disappearing down the hallway. Scott then went to the control board for the security system and quickly found the off button for the not-so-silent alarm.
“The database should be this way,” Jean started down one of the side halls, Scott and Bobby following her past several office doors, stopping at an intersection when Jean came to a halt, throwing her hand up for them to be quiet.
That’s when Scott heard it, the shuffle of feet and the light clicking of a utility belt.
Jean leaned back against the wall and closed her eyes, taking a deep breath, whispering, “Sleep,” followed by a soft thud in the hallway.
The group finally rounded the corner to see the other guard curled up peacefully on the floor.
“Now that’s cool,” Bobby grinned.
“Helps when they are already halfway there,” Jean shrugged as Scott tried one of the doors to find it was unlocked and opened into a small office, “much easier to trick the mind when it’s willing.”
“Good job nevertheless,” Scott smiled at her then gestured to Bobby to help him quickly move the man into the office. He didn’t wake up, just snored a little louder.
They were about to leave when Bobby grabbed a coat that was hanging on a hook and balled it up quickly, stuffing it under the man’s head. When the two just looked at him, he splayed his hands and said, “What? It’s thirteen degrees colder in this part of the building, I bet the heating isn’t’ even on.”
Scott and Jean exchanged looks, then with a smile headed towards the database. They came across another locked door, Scott blasted it open as he did the last one.
The database room was dark except for the eerie glow of pinpoint reds, yellows, and blues from the stacks of servers which stood like monoliths across the room. Jean turned on the lights and that didn’t make it any better, only highlighted the fact that there was more servers than he could immediately count.
“Is this in preparation for Sentinel’s launch,” Scott wondered out loud as they headed over to the control module, “or do they have that much information on mutants?”
“How many servers are there?” Kitty asked, “I wanna see!”
“One second,” Jean closed her eyes and everyone on the link received a mental image of the server room.
“Woah,” Kitty said in awe. “Hook up Nimrod and let’s find out.”
Jean pulled Nimrod out of the backpack and sat it on the top of a work station, mumbling the word ‘left’ to herself as she connected the processor. Then waking up the computer tablet, she started to run through the prompts when Storm made her way into the room from the other end.
“Hey, Ro,” Scott greeted her, “nice work upstairs.”
“Yeah,” Bobby popped his head from around the server he was looking at, “just what kind of habits are we talking about here?”
She gave him a coy smile, “Discussion for another time.”
“Good news,” Kitty said as she was receiving a real time feed from the tablet to her laptop, “the servers are not completely full.”
“Bad news?” Scott asked wryly.
“It’s going to take forty-five-ish minutes to download everything,” there was an unspoken ‘sorry’ in her voice.
Scott gave this a moment’s consideration, “Alright, JP and Logan stick to perimeter patrol, we’ll just have to sit it out and hope we’re wrong about the ambush.”
…
Quicksilver and Rogue were both staring through binoculars as they stood on top of the A/C vents of a building about two blocks away, spotting Wolverine jump from the roof of one building to another.
“Sure he can’t smell us?” Quicksilver asked.
“The wind hasn’t shifted,” Sabretooth was crouched below them on the roof.
“Good,” he lowered his binoculars and glanced around at his team, all waiting to go, “conservative estimates put the download time between half an hour to an hour. I say we go in forty.”
“What about the midnight snack they left behind?” Sabretooth spoke with a little too much glee in his voice.
“Leave her,” he told the man empathically, “there is nothing she can do at that distance but tip her teammates off. You’ll just have to get your jollies beating the crap out of Wolverine.”
Sabretooth bared his teeth but made no other comment.
“You know,” Pyro piped up from where he was sitting against the vents, a notebook filled with his scribbles sitting on his lap, “they have to figure this is an ambush.”
Quicksilver frowned then looked over at Rogue who gave him a ‘he’s right’ shrug.
This was going to be a long night.
…
“Doing another sweep of the second floor,” Bobby told everyone as he checked out a conference room.
As he shuffled down the hallway, he started to hum a tune while patting his jeans like a drummer. “Should have brought my ipod.”
“We can hear you,” Kitty said.
“Hey,” he stopped, “think if you turned on the satellite radio Jean could pipe it through?”
“Don’t even think about it,” the red head shut that down.
“Damn,” he shook his head and crossed an open area of cubicles to get to the elevator.
There was something, a little bristle of noise, he barely heard it over his own footfalls. Stopping and turning, all he could see was empty workspaces and the light hum of computers left on overnight.
A hot breeze put chills down his neck and his stomach dropped.
Slowly he turned back towards the hallway, only to find his view blocked by a tall muscular man with shaggy blonde hair and lots of teeth… lots of very sharp teeth.
Letting out a yelp he jumped back and threw up an ice barrier of at least two inches thick.
Within seconds, Sabretooth, it had to be Sabretooth, crashed through the ice, sending shards flying in every direction.
The raging beast let out a long snarling howl… and Bobby did the only thing he could think to do…
He ran.
…
Scott walked up to Jean who as looking at the tablet, “How long?”
“Almost there, just another min—” she lurched slightly, as did the rest of them.
“What just happened?” JP asked.
“Sabretooth, Sabretooth, SABRETOOTH!!!” was all they heard coming from Bobby.
“Damnit,” Scott thought quickly, trying to ignore the fact that the lesser congenial feral mutant had somehow snuck onto the second floor without any of them knowing, “Logan, what’s your status?” No answer, “Wolverine?!”
“Done,” Jean said and started to unplug Nimrod from the system.
“Storm, help Bobby,” he told the woman, “I’ll go with Jean to get Nimrod out.”
The Weather Witch nodded, but just as she turned towards the door, the room started to fill up with living fire.
“Pyro,” Jean said, trying to reach out and control the fire, but it literally filled up every empty space beyond the servers themselves, “there’s too much of it.”
“He is easy enough to deal with,” Storm reached out and shot a lightning bolt directly at one of the sprinkler heads.
It popped with a few sparks, but nothing happened.
“They turned off the sprinkler system,” Scott was looking every which way, keeping Jean and Nimrod just behind him, “Kitty, can you turn it back on.”
“Working on it,” she said back.
The fire only continued to grow.
…
“Help… me…” Bobby’s voice was cracked and panicked.
“On my way,” JP was outside the building when everything started to go down. In an instance he was zipping around to the entrance, heading towards the stairwell to go upstairs. When he hit the landing, rounding around to the next set of stairs, a mass flew into his way.
At that speed, the sudden impact counteracted on his forward momentum and literally brought him to a screeching halt, his body flying backwards into the wall.
It was only thanks to his endurance and speed he was able to reach out and grab the wrists of his attacker. She had a fair amount of strength in her frame, and he managed to lock one arm above their heads while he kept the other across their bodies, nearly choking themselves.
“Well, ain’t this cosy,” the Southerner drawled as her hips and legs were locked against his to keep him from getting any purchase against the ground, or to move in any way, really.
As he struggled to get free of her hold, she laughed, “You speedsters are all the same, rely too much on your speed, but once you know the trick,” she grunted slightly as he nearly managed to get his leg free only to have her move and twist his leg, “it’s really a simple thing to get past.”
“Can’t stay like this forever,” he said back through gritted teeth, trying to think of another way to get loose without freeing up one of her hands to absorb him.
“You could always give me a little kiss,” she said sweetly, “you take a nice little nap. I promise you it’ll be worth it.”
“Sorry,” he tried again but his leg was so twisted he feared something was going to break, “you’re not my type.”
“Aw,” she pouted, “don’t like your females strong and independent?”
“Nah,” he relaxed a little, trying to approach this like a Chinese finger trap, “don’t like them female.”
It took her a second, “Oh,” she shrugged, “fair enough.”
…
“They must have disconnected the system manually,” Kitty was feverishly typing away at her laptop, “and there goes the freaking cameras,” she said as everything went dark, she was literally five seconds away from throwing the thing out the window.
“Guys,” she looked out the front of the Escape, she could just see the building in the distance, “what can I do?”
No one said anything.
“Guys?”
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