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1X08 – Scarlet – Act III
The following morning found several of the students in the converted ballroom which was often used as the auditorium. They were moving large round tables around and getting them in position for the big dinner planned out for Thanksgiving.
“So this is ‘the board’,” Jean-Paul asked as Scott wheeled in a cork board to put at the end of the room.
“Yeah,” Scott got it into place and locked the wheels, “the Professor likes to put everyone’s thanks on it anonymously, that way everyone feels the need to be able to speak their mind. Though, yeah, some thanks are more obvious than others,” he chuckled, “Jubilee’s always seem to involve characters in those books she reads.”
“That’s an interesting tradition,” the man nodded, “but I guess you guys have to make up for being a month late.”
Scott’s brow creased, “A month late?”
“In Canada, we have Thanksgiving in October,” he told the man, “that way we have time to recover instead of going right into Christmas.”
“Oh, right,” Scott smiled, “so I guess that means you get to give double thanks then?”
Jean-Paul was about to reply with a snarky comment, but then his face sobered, “No, I don’t think it works that way.”
The other man took a moment to figure out what he was getting at, with Jeanne-Marie gone to who knows where, it wasn’t exactly a thankful time for him. Scott tried to salvage the situation, but not with false platitudes, “Well, you can always be doubly thankful for the chef’s Thanksgiving Turkey, it’s something special, I tell you.”
“Turkey should be for Christmas,” Betsy walked up with Kitty beside her, “why you colonists insist on ham for Christmas is heresy.”
“Why do people even eat ham,” Kitty shuddered, “do you know what pigs will eat? They’re worse than goats!”
And it all devolved from there.
…
Pietro was in the living room, looking over the blueprints, when Wanda found him.
“{Are they back yet?}” she asked in Romanian, grabbing a drink from the refrigerator.
“{No,}” he replied in their native language, not bothering to look up, “{but they know what they are doing, they are quite good.}”
“{I remember,}” she smiled, then looked at him thoughtfully, returning to English, “it’s a very interesting holiday the American’s have… Thanksgiving. They need a whole day to be thankful for all the good things in their lives. Are they not thankful every other day?”
“I think it is more about having a tradition,” he offered, “they are such a young country with so little history. Like children they are trying to act all grown up.”
“I suppose at least it is a good holiday,” she shrugged, opening her cola, “a time to be together with their families…”
“I suppose,” he said distractedly and she was sure it had nothing to do with the map in front of him.
Wanda decided to broach a sensitive subject, “Have you spoken to Lorna recently?”
“I don’t even know where she is,” he gave his sister a questioning glare, “do you?”
“I have an inkling,” she admitted, letting out a long breath, “and as much as I would like to see father’s favorite lose her anonymity, I cannot fault the woman for genetics she had no control over.”
“How enlightened,” he was not terribly impressed but he let the subject drop.
Silent filled the room again, Wanda trying another angle, “Why the day before Thanksgiving? Why not the day of? Surely that is more opportune?”
“That is what everyone will suspect,” he replied easily.
“Then why don’t we make use of this plan of yours,” she stepped forward, “we can spend Thanksgiving together, we could even see father.”
He looked at her sharply, “Since when did you ever want to spend any time with him?”
“I’ve been away a long time,” she offered easily, “left a lot of things said and unsaid.”
“I don’t think that’s it,” he was rightfully suspicious.
“Perhaps it’s not,” Wanda admitted, “but we should still go, whatever reasons I have aside, do you have any reasons not to?”
For someone who was so quick to think, he could be awfully slow in comebacks.
“I thought as much,” she gave herself a satisfactory smile. “Pyro was right to be concerned about your behavior.”
“That pyromaniac talks too much,” he frowned.
Wanda snickered slightly at the ironic use of words from the man who always spoke a little faster than everyone else, “So where will you be over Thanksgiving then? What’s her name?”
“You jump to an awful big conclusion there,” he spoke sourly.
“I’m your sister,” she shrugged, unfazed, “it may not be obvious to others but I know you. My little brother is in love.”
“I’m not your little brother,” Pietro grouchily shot back.
“I was born first, therefore I’m older,” she smirked at him, “only race you ever lost.”
He made a face but didn’t actual argue this time.
“So,” continuing her interrogation, “what’s her name? Will you tell me that much at least?”
There was another pause, a long thoughtful moment for her brother but mere seconds for her, “Crystal.”
“Pretty name,” she smiled, “will I ever get to meet her?”
Pietro glanced up at her and she could see it in his eyes, a truth that was very dangerous to him as well as his lady-love.
“She’s human,” Wanda realized, “isn’t she.”
“Very much so,” he confessed, then eyed her warily, “this isn’t going to be a problem?”
“For me, you know it’s not,” she was a little offended that he questioned her, “but if father finds out…”
“Fatherwillnotfindout,” he said quickly.
“I hope so, for her sake,” Wanda gave him a sympathetic pat of his hand, “but the risk is there. Is she really worth it?”
“Yes,” he nodded, a wistful smile coming to his lips, “when I’m with Crystal… the world… speeds up.”
The world was incredibly slow and frustrating for the speed mutant, the fact that he found a woman who made all that fade away into nothingness made Wanda very happy for her brother. But it was a dangerous game he was playing and he was being sloppy. If she figured it out… could others, like their father…
There was noise from the garage as the other Acolytes returned from their side mission. They walked through the doors, arguing about the lyrics to some song.
Pietro, like always, was impatient with them, “How did it go?”
“Easy as a Georgia peach pie,” Rogue smiled, putting her handbag on the counter. She was dressed up like someone who had gone to a bar to pick up a guy which technically did happen. But she had on a few more layers than might be expected, such as black tights, scarf and long gloves. “He doesn’t work tomorrow so left him half naked in his bathtub with a dozen empty liquor bottles, he’ll wake up thinking he had one hell of a bender.”
“Did you get anything useful?” Pietro asked with a touch of impatience.
“He doesn’t actually know what they are doing in the sub-level,” Rogue admitted, “but they are on a little higher alert now. They have sensors and lasers, biometric scanning, the whole lot.”
“Which we will bypass if my calculations are correct,” Dom pointed to the blue-prints.
“I only have to make sure no one is paying attention,” Wanda added, “that’s easy enough.”
“Then the plan is a go,” Pietro told everyone, “Rogue, Pyro, you keep an eye on the building starting at four, I’ll run the access points at seven, we break in at seven forty-five. Dom, Wanda, be prepared for the heavy lifting.”
There was a general mummer of consensus, it was a good plan.
“You know,” Wanda spoke up, “I want to change my name.”
“What is wrong with Roșu?” Pietro asked, the word being Romanian for the color red.
“I picked that out when I was sixteen,” she frowned at him, “and in a rush, I never felt it was really me.”
“Fair enough,” Rogue easily came to her defense, “what would you like?”
After a moment’s consideration, Wanda picked up one of the Mavendore books from the counter, “Scarlet Witch, it’s what Theodinious calls Queen Jandamarra. I like it.”
“But,” Pyro quickly uttered before anyone could say anything, “you can’t…”
“Why not?” she raised a brow at him.
“It’s… um… copyrighted?”
Wanda, Pietro and Dom looked at him like he was crazy while Rogue just buried her face in one hand.
“Truthfully,” Pietro turned back to his sister, “it’s kinda long for a call sign.”
“It’s three syllables,” she made a face at her brother, “Quick-sil-ver.”
“But,” he cleared his throat, trying to save face, “Quicksilver is only word.”
“Magneto always said we have two names,” Rogue broke in to keep the peace, “the name we’re born with, and the name which reflects who we truly are. He is a Pyro,” she gestured to the Aussie, then over to Dom, “he is an Avalanche, your brother is Quicksilver,” she figured by putting her hand to her chest, “and I am Rogue.”
“Do you really want to be known as a witch?” Pietro asked her in all seriousness.
Wanda turned her soft brown eyes towards her brother and they were full of pain that only he would recognize.
A barn was on fire and a man was chasing the young twins, shotgun in his hand, screaming out the word Hexe… Witch.
“Our people have been called much worse,” she replied evenly, “and there becomes a point where an insult can be worn proudly. My powers are the closest to magic we have seen in this world,” Wanda gave him a hint of a smile, “and scarlet has always been my favorite color.”
…
“Are you writing your thanks?” Jubilee asked as she looked up from reading one of the Mavendore books.
“Trying to,” Meg frowned, “and trying not to sound selfish, but really, I’m not sure how many people truly understand just how brilliant sleeves are until you have to do without them.”
“Especially during winter in New York?” the other girl grinned.
“Especially then,” she rubbed her hands down the fabric of her custom made sweater.
“I don’t think anyone will begrudge you being thankful for that,” Jubilee chuckled, “begrudge you, such a posh turn of phrase.”
Meg let out a little laugh, then her eyes got a little wider as the proverbial light went on, “Oh, I know exactly what I’ll write.”
“See, knew you’d figure it out,” Jubilee gave her a big grin.
“What about you,” Meg said as she finished writing the sentence, “another Mavendore related thanks?”
“It’s tradition,” the girl easily replied.
“But surely that can’t be the only thing you’re grateful for,” Meg frowned.
“Oh, I’m thankful for many things,” Jubilee laid her book down and smiled, “I’m thankful for the sun shining, the birds singing, good friends, good food, and having a place that accepts me for who I am.”
Meg was nearly speechless for a moment, “Then why don’t you write that?”
“Because I’m thankful for that every day,” Jubilee told her, “and I express it every day in everything I do. Most of us here are orphans in one way or another and I make sure they don’t feel like that has to define them,” her lips spread in a broad smile, “but when it comes to Thanksgiving, then I’m thankful for the things that help me do that, and for the past few years,” she held up her book, “it’s Queen Jandamarra saving her kingdom by her sheer force of will.”
“That’s…” a smile crept onto Meg’s lips, “very mature of you.”
Jubilee’s eyes went wide, “Please don’t tell anyone, you’ll totally ruin my street cred.”
After a split second, the two girls broke into laugher that could be heard down the hall.
…
Quicksilver, Rogue and Pyro where keeping watch during a guard change.
“Alright,” their leader said, “shut down, meet at the rendezvous in twenty.”
Rogue nodded and the man disappeared, leaving the group to pack away their surveillance equipment as he went to join the other two.
“Why did you have to give her the book?” Pyro asked as they took apart the scope and tripod.
“Because she’s my friend?” Rogue nearly laughed at the absurdity, “You didn’t know she read them?”
All Pyro did was frown.
A few minutes later, their equipment was stowed in the car and they were running down an alley way, stopping at a manhole cover. Pyro slid it over and Rogue slipped down first, thankful she had traded her normal boots for some water-tight ones and pulled a flashlight out of her pocket.
“This way,” she said as she remembered the sewage blueprints, heading back towards Bella-Agra. They then found a hole in the ground that didn’t look to be part of the layout. It dropped into another, more cramped, maintenance tunnel that led closer to the target.
“What’s that smell?” Pyro asked with a little gag in his voice.
“Try not to think about it,” was all Rogue could offer.
They eventually caught up with the rest of the team when they went down a new tunnel formed in the bedrock. Avalanche had his hand up on the packed dirt and after only a few seconds it crumbled to dust leaving nothing but a concrete slab, the exterior of the basement.
“Alright,” Quicksilver turned to his sister, “you ready, Scarlet?”
She gave him a slightly annoyed look for not using her whole name, but walked up to the concrete and placed both hands on it, closing her eyes. The Scarlet Witch took a long, slow, breath, and a ripple of static electricity passed through the tunnel, giving everyone the involuntary shivers.
…
Inside the room they were about to enter, a man in a white lab coat sat in chair in front of a computer and monitoring station. He picked up his coffee to bring it to his lips, but somehow misjudged the distance to his mouth and ended up spilling the brown liquid completely down the front of his shirt.
Being that it was coffee and very hot, he reacted by jumping up, knocking the table as he did so.
This in turn knocked over a couple of binders.
The last binder hit the edge of a decorative stand which held a baseball, one of the many items of Mets paraphernalia on the man’s desk.
The ball was then launched into a small arch that managed to make it across to another desk.
Crashing into the pen holder, it fell over violently, ejecting several pens which flew across to the next desk.
Sitting on the desk was a coffee cup the owner of which forgot to take to the kitchen before he left for the day, such a rush he had been to leave for the holiday.
The pen landed in the coffee cup and sent the liquid flying up into the air… just high enough to hit the lens of the camera which was watching over the room.
As the lab tech was trying to clean the coffee from his shirt, his phone rang. Seeing that it was the security desk, he hit the speaker button and went back to trying to clean his shirt.
“Did you just see what happened, Joe?” the security guard said on the other end of the line.
“See what,” Joe frowned at his clothes.
“Had a regular Rube Goldberg machine going on in there,” the man chuckled, “that’s so going on YouTube.”
Joe looked around and saw his baseball sitting on the other desk and a little trail of destruction in its wake. Annoyed, he went over and grabbed it, he had it signed by David Wright and it might be worth something some day.
“Anyway,” the guard continued, “it looks like something got on the camera. Can you do me a favor and clear it off so I don’t have to come all the way down there?”
“Yeah, sure,” Joe sighed, putting his baseball back, “I’m going to have to clean this whole mess up, and change my clothes. I’ll get some stuff from the janitor’s closet and do it after I change in the locker room.”
“No sweat man,” the guard seemed slightly relieved, probably because he was eating his dinner at his desk, “thanks.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Joe cut off the phone, then headed out the door, being sure to lock it.
…
The wall on the other side of the room began to slowly shimmer as it started to disintegrate. Dusty concrete powder fell away and an arched doorway appeared in the wall.
A streak of white light swept through the room then came to a halt in the middle of it, “It’s clear.”
The rest of the team filed through, Rogue glancing up at the smeared lens of the camera appreciatively, “Nice.”
Wanda walked over to the desks and traced back the Probability Matrix, “Not bad, a little less elegant than I’d like, but one makes due when they can’t actually see what the probabilities are pointing towards.”
Pyro was already at Joe’s desk, looking through the system, Quicksilver hovering over him.
“Well,” their leader said after a solid minute.
“This is definitely not agricultural research,” images came up on the screen of the typical DNA helix, “but this guy is just a number’s man, he doesn’t actual have access to the sub- basement.”
“Then we’ll need to check it out,” Pietro came to the conclusion quickly, “can you get into security from here?”
“Hold please,” Pyro replied in a sing-song manner and typed away, eventually saying, “I’m in.”
“Good, you stay here and keep the cameras off of us,” he turned towards Avalanche, “Avalance rest up, whoever was here will be back, take care of them,” the Greek nodded, he had used a lot of his abilities burrowing the tunnel and that would be rough on anyone. Pietro then turned to the women, “let’s have a look around, shall we?”
…
While Pietro sped around the basement, Wanda and Rogue headed straight to the stairwell leading to the sub-basement of the building. It had a nasty looking biometric lock on it.
“Pyro,” Rogue said into her ear piece, “you wanna do the honors?”
A moment later, the door buzzed and popped open.
Quickly slipping through, they went down the stairs and as Rogue was about to grab the door handle, Wanda put her hand on her arm to still her. Rogue glanced over to see the woman crease her brow. Footsteps could be heard just beyond the door and she took a step back slowly, quietly, her hands up in case the guard came through.
The footfalls then started to get softer as the guard walked away.
“Now,” Wanda said and Rogue opened the door slowly, peeking her head out to see no one around.
“Did you make him leave?” Rogue whispered as they made their way down the hall.
“No,” the woman admitted, “there was only an eight percent chance he’d bother checking the stairwell, so I figured we were safe.”
Rogue stifled a laugh and glanced down both ends of the hall, “Alright, we have a guard, he went that way,” she pointed to the direction she heard the steps go, “so I think we should try looking this way first.”
“Probability Matrix says this way,” Wanda turned and started to go in the direction of the guard.
“Um, okay,” Rogue wasn’t exactly happy with going towards the guard but knew better than to question Wanda when she was getting ‘a reading’.
…
Up in the basement, Joe had changed his shirt from one he had in the locker room, but his lab coat was still stained. Annoyed, but carrying a bottle of multi-purpose cleaner and a soft rag, he swiped his card and walked back into the office he was holed up in, alone, because everyone else had asked off and he was the last one standing, as it were.
Letting the door close behind him, he didn’t even bother looking up from the bottle of cleaner, wondering if it would be okay to use on the camera. Maybe if he just put a little on the rag and only wiped down the lens? That should work.
Glancing up, he first saw the big hole in the wall that shouldn’t be there.
Then he saw a man with flame-colored hair sitting at his desk, smiling at him and waving like a kid about to go on a rollercoaster ride.
He opened his mouth to say something when a strong hand grabbed him by the back of the neck.
Turning his face towards his attacker, all the big man did was put his finger to lips in a ‘no talking’ gesture.
Joe’s shoulders fell, he wasn’t paid enough for this crap.
…
Waiting for that same guard to pass again, Rogue and Wanda slipped around a corner and made their way to the end of a hallway where there was a military grade blast door.
“I think we found the Cracker Jack prize,” Rogue said into her ear piece, “Pyro, can you get us in.”
“Working on it,” he said, then after a second, she could hear him ask someone, “what’s behind door 38C.”
“Who are you talking to?” Rogue asked curiously.
“A friendly Bella-Agra employee,” Pyro said cheerfully, “we have him tied up in the corner.”
Rogue and Wanda just exchanged looks, at least he didn’t set the man on fire.
“He says he doesn’t know,” Pyro came back over the line, “the room is off limits except for like three people. It’s also a security blind spot.”
“Then sounds like the place,” Quicksilver was suddenly behind them, “I found nothing on the basement level and you’re getting a strong feeling about this, Scarlet?”
She gave the man an unamused look at his refusal to use her whole mutant name, “All I feel is a strong probability behind this door, probability of what, I don’t know.”
“Good enough for me,” Rogue interjected, “can you get the door opened, Pyro?”
“I said, security blind spot,” the Aussie was a little frustrated, “this is definitely the most secure room in the complex.”
“Here,” Wanda walked up to the biometric scanner and placed her hand on the reader, “let me help.”
The Scarlet Witch took a long breath and focused on the control panel, slowly running the numbers of the 1’s and 0’s of information traveling between wires. There was a slight reddish glow and then the panel made a beeping sound, turning green. Another pop-hiss and the door opened up.
Rogue grabbed the handle and pulled the heavy door wide while Pietro quickly stepped inside.
“It’s clear,” he told them and they entered to see a dark lab, several tables and glowing machinery around as one would expect.
“Yeah, I’d say this is the right place,” Rogue murmured as she closed the door behind them in case the guard came back around.
“There’s a computer terminal,” Pietro pointed to one of the work stations, “get Pyro connected, see what he can download.”
Rogue took a seat at the computer and took out a wireless USB receiver from her pocket. She slipped it into a slot and began to talk to Pyro regarding getting a direct line into the computer.
Wanda got another feeling, something she could never explain properly as it was part of her mutation, a ripple in the Probability Matrix that called to her. Turning towards the ethereal nudge, Wanda walked between several tables and around a standing cabinet. There she came upon a pressure door to a concrete room that was built into the level.
There wasn’t a lock on the door so she grabbed the wheel and began to turn it until she heard the bracers release. Pulling it open, a cold air rolled out, fog billowing at her feet.
Crossing the threshold, she found the light switches. A blue light clicked on overhead, a soft glow that helped to maintain the coldness of the sterile room.
Once Wanda’s eyes adjusted, a vision of horror crossed her face…
“No…”
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