5174/It's Beginning to Look A Lot Like Dr. Frankenstein's Lab...

It's Beginning to Look A Lot Like Dr. Frankenstein's Lab...
Date of Scene:	14 February 2021
Location:	Near Nepperhan, NY
Synopsis:	People are jerks! Murdering mutants to steal their powers? Enter angry X-Men.
Cast of Characters:	Illyana Rasputina, Paige Guthrie, Scott Summers

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Illyana Rasputina has posed:
When trouble hits, there at least is a site for Scott to go to. Taking Paige with him as a passenger will be the name of the game, however he manages it. The Russian sorceress doesn't opt to drive, instead announcing reconnaissance of her own. Too late to say no; one portal later and she is gone. Though not without tossing a card back through another portal with the address written down, a few minutes later. Say whatever one will, but she prizes efficiency.

Just outside New York proper, the outer rings of suburbs melt into a continuous series of towns with varied names like Homefield, Yonkers, Bryn Mawr Park. Tucked away close to a reservoir, smooshed up against I-87 northbound, is a long, thin cemetery bordered in fieldstone walls and a vestige of the comparatively ancient occupation of the Hudson Valley. Adjacent to St. Mary's Cemetery is a house in rather poor shape, one that probably didn't survive the vestiges of time well. It backs up onto the cemetery away from the new construction signalling more business parks, another big box store, all the signs of modern consumerism.

In another season, it would be leafy and green and welcoming. In another season, the place wouldn't hold an air of dread. The leafless trees along a serpentine creek stretch their grey, crooked boughs to the equally monotonous sky. Snow doesn't do much to conceal the violence that took place around the house, though presumably someone tried their best to maybe hide a bit of the violence.

For a calculating eye, there are too many signs. Shots taken into the siding, bullet holes for a fairly high calibre. The front door is ripped from its hinges, the explosion that mangled the entrance leaving shrapnel and debris scattered around the abandoned interior and exterior. Presumably /someone/ reported this given the house isn't off the beaten path but no police tape is up. No cameras in the trees.

It's the back of the house that abuts the cemetery, a few bulky headstones of newer make among the much older ones from a previous century, a presumably more genteel and bucolic time. Between the open door from the back of the house and the graves are overturned earth. A /lot/ of overturned earth.

And when one has the benefit of driving down, they can park in an abandoned driveway since no one here apparently had a car. However many people occupied the two-storey build, they weren't using motorcycles or sedans to get around.

Paige Guthrie has posed:
"This is it." Paige says as she climbs out of the passenger seat, then reaches up to pull her hair back and up into a ponytail. Wearing a heavy jacket, two layers of shirts and a pair of jeans, she looks fairly casual as she strides forward, giving a long stretch of her body. "Ah'm sure Illyana is already here and snooping about."

"So, what happened was ah' was down th' street at the cafe with some friends of mine when we heard this explosion, then ah' ton of smoke. So, ah' jumped that barbed wire fence and made mah' way over." She says, giving a point to the combat torn house. "Ah' saw a ton of people runnin' for their lives. One of mah' friends called 911 and ah' went in ta' get the injured. Next thing ah' knew, this lady ah' was holding on to ... her head just blew up from a sniper position. Illyana happened on scene and teleported me out. Said that Cable and Quentin was shooting on these ah.. mutants.. but Cable was hollering something about how they stole their powers."

There's a lift of her shoulders "Still not sure why he had to start shooting 'em like cattle though. Ah' won't ever forget that." Her lips press together into a thin line as she trudges forward. "This looks like ah' warzone."

Scott Summers has posed:
Scott opt to take his Mazda RX-8 for this op. Wearing a brown bomber jacket over a black flex-material t-shirt and semilarly colored cargo pants with combat boots, his swept brown hair is, naturally, very stylishly cut with bangs curled slightly just over the metal frame of a long thin visor fixed to the sides of his face with a small knob and dial arrangement near his left temple.

Stoically, Scott crunches through the frost on the ground towards the building as Paige explains what took place from her perspective. Observant eyes taking in details as they approach with a clipped nod at the last statement she's made regarding the nature of the warzone. "Stole their powers." He repeats with a frown, "Where people returning fire?" Noting all the bullet holes and blast points.

He'd had them carry comms, only because he knew Illyana was going to go do Illyana things and he wanted to be able to keep in contact with the Russian Sorceress.

Illyana Rasputina has posed:
Already here is an understatement. Not lounging on a wall, not sitting under a tree reading some intrigue-laden spy thriller against American apparatchiks. Illyana knows better than that. Black pants and black coat don't quite blend in, but they work well enough as she moves among the headstones that flank the back of the house. Bodies fell here; from smart shots and strange powers. The volcanic heat of a lava burst leaves a trail of glass.

Quiet, step by step, she traces the periphery. Having a flaming magical artifact would be an inconvenience, but her mobile phone with some AR game app makes explaining her whereabouts easier if she's trying to capture enough motes to join the Justice League or gather all the missing gears from Iron Man's stolen suit in Avengers Go! Something like that, innocuous apps eating data that she has some way of paying for, surely.

In the collective unconsciousness of the world, nothing like seeing someone wander by. Anyone fool enough to get too nosy will have to contend with an actual adult for once. She watches the other pair arrive in the fancy car, head tilted slightly. Her breath barely steams in the cold. <<No one here so far. Six cars at most, no one stopped.>>

Paige Guthrie has posed:
"Not that ah saw. Ah know they were running for their lives and getting shot down. They weren't making it far. Ah' was trying to not get shot myself. All ah' know is that there was bullets and explosions going on around the back and the front and ah' just wanted ta' get as many people out as I could. Which.. wasn't very man. Zero, actaully. He killed 'em all. A few of themn was trying ta' use their powers defensively but they weren't good at it. They all looked like day one muties."

Paige gives a slight sniff of the air as she moves towards the house, feeling the remains of snow crunching under her shoes. Peeking inside, she blanches at the sight before her, then lets out a slow breath. She starts through to inspect a few of the rooms, stepping over the deceased that she would find, then starts hunting for anything that could help her. Files. Computers. Paperwork.

"Smells like a mule's morning breath in 'ere." She drawls out in her twang.

Scott Summers has posed:
Scott isn't as taken aback by the carnage as is Paige, which is as much a hardship as it is a boon in almost all circumstances. Empathetically, he's a robot, at least externally. All of his emotional response to this is kept internal. Looking from the spots where bodies obvious fell to another, and another, no shortage.

The response to Illyana is a double series of clicks in acknowledgement.

Joining Paige to peek inside, the smell hits him and he recoils at the surprising musk of dried, frozen blood. It's a repulsive stinch which he has no business being familiar with. "Your thoughts were in the right place." Cool tone, but genuine, as he glances around the dark interior until he shines a small, but extremely high powered, light inside from a handheld cube from one of the pockets of his cargo pants.

"Why were you here?"

Illyana Rasputina has posed:
What do Scott and Illyana have in common? Aside from three hundred plans at a given time, the emotional restraint that makes the average synthezoid resemble an agent of chaos or the average hormone-riddled teenager. Her survey can wait once things narrow down a bit, and they have parked and settled. Slipping towards them with a perfectly swift, purposeful stride should not be misread as anything other than diligent in its determination to deal with the issue.

"More footprints than before. Maybe someone stopped to look and ran." The awful scent of the place with its killing floor outside and the chopping room inside doesn't faze her much, or she has a hell of a poker face. Might well be this isn't the first time she dealed with the ordure and the rot.

And thus, the question point-blank gets a laconic, deadpan answer. "Walking in the cemetery." They're parks, and picturesque, and Russian culture is just bloody strange once leaping outside the vague European sphere of influence at St. Petersburg.

Beyond, the revelations just come with rooms stripped down to something like a clinic, albeit circa 1897. A few apparati, tubes and IV poles and a fridge, vaguely resemble the norm. But normal it is not.

Paige Guthrie has posed:
"Why'd ah' come here? People were screaming for their life. Ah' wanted ta' help 'em. Ah' thought they was mutants being gunned down by someone like .. th' Friends of Humanity, or th' Reavers, or your generic bigots. After what happened at th' riots, ah' figured anti-mutant attacks was going to start ramping up." Paige slips into a seat at a desk, then pulls a keyboard up in front of her. She taps the power button and listens to it crank up, then reaches into her pocket to pull out a small thumb drive to connect it.

From there, the hayseed's fingers are flying along the keys as she cracks through the password, then starts fishing the files, dragging and dropping over everything that she can find. "Ah'm sure Doctor McCoy will be able ta' make heads and tails of this." She shifts her jaw to one side. "Huh." She leans forward to squint at the screen, then slows down her typing to start scrolling with her mouse. She gives a few more flicks to drag a couple of more files over.

"Ah found a file called matching donors. It looks like they was looking for specific mutants that had similiar genetic sequencing that they did. So, ya'know, they could splice th' DNA together. Otherwise, the body would reject it. Ya'know, like trying ta' stick different blood types in you? Or not finging th' right bone marrow? They had to be pretty particular about this. It's like they was creating mutants outta normal healthy humans."

Scott Summers has posed:
The answer is perfectly Illyana and perfectly believable, so Scott accepts it with little more than a clipped nod as he pushes into the rank interior once he's had a chance to let his senses adjust. It's not the first time Scott has seen something like this.. It's the ugly business for which the X-Men were created, whether Xavier wanted to say so or not. The fact places like this exists is the entire purpose of having a paramilitary, mutant powered team to put it down with ruthless effeciency.

The fact that someone had gone gun crazy and that innocent people might have gotten caught in the crossfire just hammers home the importance of it. Shining a light off some of the more archaeic, even barbaric, apparati.

He accepts Paige's response as well, nodding as he leans over her chair to read some of the information she's pulling over as she reads it out to them. "We need to find where they've taken the bodies. Preferrably before they do an autopsy... or whoever is responsible gets to them." Which might sound really cold, but...

Pragmatic.

Glancing back at Illyana. "How old are the footprints?"

Illyana Rasputina has posed:
The beam of the cellular phone offers reasonably fair illumination to double up on any other source they carry, strobed in gentle sweeps by Illyana. The ceiling gets just as much attention as the floor, searching for niches occupied by unseen materials or technical modifications that would possibly stand out.

"We have two," she replies to Scott from a short distance behind him. "Alive." The stress on the latter clipped word covers the necessity of defining their current status. "Useful for questioning."

Her eyes slowly lose their limited colour, bleached out into a brilliant incandescence pooling with plasmoid glints, dissolving through a natural spectrum into the white-blue of hypergiant stars and magnesium torches. "The shooter was on the roof. Quentin incapacitated one in the yard." Facts that fall as she taps into that dimensional wellspring, pricking fissures in the fabric of reality to peer through. "I do not think he killed them. As I told Dr. McCoy, we did not see the outcome." A nod at Paige indicates the other source of the plural; she may be the Demon Queen, but breaking into royal plurals tends to be only in the very worst of situations and this barely ranks in the top thousand of 'worst and awful days.'

Slender fingers trek across the space. "Are you asking me to deliver the bodies to Westchester?"

Paige Guthrie has posed:
Furrowing her brows, Paige pulls the thumb drive out, then yanks out the power cable from the back of the computer. From there, she bends down and plucks it up, then sets it on the table, using her fingers to work the screws of the casing open. From there, she starts wiggling cables to the side to get to the hard drive and disconnect it.

"Ahl'right. Ah' got everything backed up and at least this master." She tucks that hard drive into her inner jacket pocket. "Ah can spend the rest of the night going through it with the good Doctor and see what other information we can pull. If I can get names and numbers or addresses, I'll make sure to send them to you, sir." She says with a firm nod to Scott.

"So .. what should we do with the rest of this place? Burn it to the ground .. call th' Avengers?"

Scott Summers has posed:
Scott meets Illyana's blue-white glowing gaze with a clipped nod, "Yes. We cannot have them getting their hands on those bodies. Not the examiners nor the individuals responsible for... this..." Motioning around with a gloved hand at the interior of the nightmare dungeon. Pragmatism. "Good work, Paige." Small praise, spoken quietly, he looks around once more for any detail they may be missing before making his final decisions on what to do with the rest of the place.

"We'll bring the two back for questioning, full precautions, directly into one of the containment facilities in the sub-basement. I'll leg Jean know we're coming." Just incase they require medical treatment.

"Same for the bodies. No telling what kind of bleed these experiments are letting off without doing a full evaluation. Hank can have a crack at it, but we'll be containing it as much as possible until we know it's safe."

Decision time.

"Burn everything else. Nobody can know anything about this." Aside from them. The royal them.

Paige Guthrie has posed:
Nodding her head, Paige says, "Ahl'right. Ya'll may wanna evacuate the building. This is still ah' bit tricky for me." She slips out of her jacket and places it outside, then reaches down to her arm to get a good hold of her skin.

SHRRRRIIIIIP!

As her skin peels away and shreds like paper, there's the sound of crackling, followed by a blaze of heat as she focuses on her omni-morphic powers to shift her arm into essentially a flame thrower. Throwing her arm outwards into one of the backrooms, there is a gout of flame that licks it's way up the side of the walls quickly.

"If ya'll wanna make s'mores while ah'm at this, we got a couple of minutes."

Scott Summers has posed:
Difficult decisions have to be made and Scott is certainly equipped to make them. He nods after Illyana going off to do his instructed and looks unto Paige with a raised brow. "Are you certain now is a good time for humor?" He wonders, albeit with the barest, difficultist, almost unseenist, of grins on his clean shaven face.

The fact that he looks away and starts moving towards a different section of the room further hiding the momentary breach of protocol: never smile. He's going in the oposite direction to Illyana, so that they might meet somewhere in the middle. He doesn't have her vision into the dark energy this place must be saturated with, and is very thankful for that, but he's got eyes.

Good ones despite his glasses.

And he wants to see the physical horror for himself.

It helps put everything into it's respective place in his head. WHY he's making the decisions he's making.

Illyana Rasputina has posed:
There could be ethical questions. For that, they've got the wrong Rasputin. The curse of that bloodline blooms in full where Illyana is involved, for she absorbs every instruction spoken by their fearless leader. "This abattoir." A minor suggestion for a word proving that, for all the surface-level Slavic torture upon the language, she commands a perfectly acceptable vocabulary. Probably among the most fiercely defined in the school, at that, but not worth dwelling on.

Her footsteps barely sound as she leaves behind the main room to head to the stairs. Those twinkling little scars in reality seal in places where she refuses to sustain the pinpoint portals, the others maintained for a moment. "No better up here, I expect."

She follows the steps up to the next landing, creeping thoughtfully to avoid the central boards of the risers in case they squeak and give her away. Carpeting surrenders to a shadowy corridor, her phone insufficient to particularly illuminate the place from end to end. While Paige robs the data from the place, she flits from doorway to doorway.

A simple act repeated with ease: open the door, peek in, ascertain nothing lives. The full spectrum of arcane Sight pried wide affords her a far deeper perspective on the horrors and fear staining the atmosphere, beyond viewing explosive-shattered or cracked glass, relics of a life behind.

Paige Guthrie has posed:
"Sir, if ah' don't laugh in th' moment, ah'm just going to start crying again. It's been ah' rough week for me." The flames roar higher as Paige's powers erupts from her arm, setting the next wall on fire as paperwork begins to crumble and turn to ash. "This is healing for me. When you scream at th' past, you trip over th' future."

Once the first room is consumed in flame, she steps out of it and starts with the next as fire juts out from her volcanic arm to douse the floors and up along the walls. Some of these chemicals are clearly combustible as tiny explosions pop-pop-pop around her.

Scott Summers has posed:
Scott can understand Paige's perspective on laughing away the pain of the past, but he doesn't vocally agree (or disagree for that matter). He goes about continuing to search while she consumes the place in fire, locking down the memory of what he's seen here. Some people laugh through it, he remembers it, in grave detail, and lets it fuel him. Push him forward into the things he has to do.

<<"See anything Else, Magik?">>

Heading back around towards where he'd last seen her cellphone glow bobbing near one of the rooms further down the hall form him. The crunch of glass beneath his feet, old wood groaning against his weight shifting it. To himself, "Why do all the mad scientists pick the creepist places to do their weird science?"

Illyana Rasputina has posed:
Laughter at pain of the past -- oh the things to be said there! Alas, the side effect for splitting the party means missing out on the banter downstairs. Probably for the better.

Room by room is swiftly cleared. A few papers taken along the way, banished into a convenient table in the teachers' rooms in the mansion, slow her progress slightly. Bank robbery might just be the next employment opportunity for a teleporter like her if the X-Men gig falls through, no? Just kidding. Still, that languishing moment of taking in the last view from the back window upon disturbed earth holds the slender girl fast until Scott's voice pulls her back.

"Nyet. Some material, nothing significant. Sight lines up here were good for him to shoot," she acknowledges. The burning wall takes her a moment to blink through and the scent of smoke overcoming that of rot. "Too much like Sinister's basement. They had resources to kill and match victims, but not to stay clean?"

Shaking her head, the sorceress clenches her teeth and flings her hand out, imperious finger pointing at the overturned soil. Not as easily as Julio would execute the awakening of the earth, she murmurs a sinuous incantation in crackling syllables that don't fit the Indo-European canon of languages in the least. But the spell works: forcing disrupted soil to churn, almost bubbling, throwing itself to the side. Faster to dislodge clods with one's hands, faster to dig.

Paige Guthrie has posed:
As the next couple of rooms engulf in flame, Paige heads back towards Scott, waving her hand in front of her face. "Should start heading outside. Don't wanna be breathing all of that in if you can help it." She says with a small cough, reaching up to her shoulder to tear away at the top of her neck, giving a long yank as her molten arm fizzles out, replaced by her normal arm. The smoke still rises off her body, followed by a small puff of smoke from between her lips.

Outside, she watches Illyana work her magic, brows lifting upwards impressively. Sliding her jacket back on her body, she zips it up and pats it down to ensure the hard drive is still there, as well as her thumb drive.

Scott Summers has posed:
Cyclops clips a nod at Illyana's observations, vocalizing what Scott himself had been thinking regarding similarities to Sinister's terrible mutation pits. His face is all hard lines as he does a final scan and starts back downstairs, "Sinister might be responsible at some level. If not directly, certainly his exeriments... which makes it even more important that we find out exactly what's going on." Which means letting Hank go over the bodies and Paige over whatever information she'd found on those computers.

Scott himself would be busy looking at the papers Illyana had snatched and left on his desk. "Good." He says to Paige as he passes on the way to the exit, turning to look at the building flame starting to lick at the interior wood panelling and disgusting rot of blood soaked decor. It's like burning out an infection. Chemotheropy for the soul.

Illyana Rasputina has posed:
Magic's native to Magik. Surprise, surprise. It doesn't all rest in the sword or the armour. She takes the stairs two at a time, a model of efficiency, to get outside after the other. Fire licks at the bubbling paint and sends long tongues racing across the ceiling, spelling condemnation for the misdeeds performed in the house. Not for those who perpetrated those evils, but the gesture is one understood with a shrug. "Copy-cats. Scientists trying to unlock the mysteries. Those jealous for their own abilities." Possibilities are cast forth with an unerring jadedness far beyond those years. For all Illyana looks young and blithe, her eyes are ancient, an embodiment of something terrible.

So awaits the ruined earth, the last and first cradle to all. She draws the magical energy into herself, letting the dissipating rumbling halt before the disturbances become nothing at all. A few specks of dust hang in the air and the torn scent of the soil fights back against other less pleasant reminders of the ill done here.

"The human soul is riddled with darkness, it requires little to crack free." She says no more, sinking her fingers into the wreckage and sifting through it. Bare skin is swept over by the black gauntlets and gloves of her armour, interlocked shadows barely affecting the fine motor control there. One thing shared with Piotr, though he might not be there.

Paige Guthrie has posed:
Now that her part is done, Paige watches the magic unfold as she stands next to Scott. She folds her arms over her chest, shifting her weight from hip to hip to loosen herself up for a moment before she blows some hair away from her eyes.

"Maybe it's like ah' black market kinda thing they got going on. High rollers spend big bucks to get powers. So, they're testing it on these guys first before they go up the chain. Make sure the product works."

She rubs at her nose with one of her hands, trying to ward the scent of smoke away. "Like, these guys coulda been beta testers. Though ah'm curious as to know how Cable got ahold of this information. Also ask 'em why he started plugging people. These people were defenseless and terrified. Ah' don't know if it sits well with me."

Scott Summers has posed:
"We wont know until we know." Scott cuts off speculation. They have enough information to go through to get some answers, if not all of them, by what they've collected. Now that the building was set ablaze, the traces of what terrible things were done inside burnt out with the crack of wood and pop of heating stone, he lowers the ruby quartz tint on his visor with the dial near his temple and blasts through one side of the wall to weaken the structural integrity enough that the fire can finish off the brick and mortor building in shorter order.

He wants it good and gone before he'll leave.

Only once one wall gives way does he turn towards his car further down the drive and begin crunching through the icy snow towards it with his hands shoved down into the pockets of his coat. Frosty breath curling up above his brown hair. Sinister thoughts dancing in his minds eye.

Illyana Rasputina has posed:
Bones, body parts, sundry bits of root and stone all come to the fore. Illyana's searching to find any evidence of interred bodies mouldering away takes time, but she nonetheless dedicates herself to the necessary task. She pulls something forth long enough to be a truncated limb, sticky with dirt, and sets that aside. Rare and unwelcome jewels to be sifted through later.

"The rest deserve burial. Honour of their rest," she utters softly, glancing at the cemetery just beyond the reach of the ruined grass and the blackened, lava-smothered patches left by a nasty spray of an attack. Getting up, she holds out her hand in front of her and a flame-etched circle manifests at an oblique angle, giving a brief glimpse beyond.

Spirals of black iron crown a long crystalline cylinder, something that if found on Earth would probably spark a bidding war to set into some kind of jewelry. Within that cage sits a man with his hands wrapped in something like metal, though nigh to impossible to be sure at a distance. He's not conscious, mercifully, though her dark lips curl back in contempt and signal a fate probably worse than any Jean will deliver.

"I have bodies to collect. Until then."

She steps through, taking the dismembered parts of another victim with her. The flash-scorch of the teleportation disk collapses on itself with a sigh, not a scream. Those surely won't come until later.