throughaphase | Benetech Labs/Xavier School- Wednesday night

Kitty	Word had come that Benetech was using a mutant for testing, and so Scott brought his team to infiltrate it. It wasn't strictly legal, by which it wasn't even a little bit legal at all, and none of them really had a problem with this, given the situation. They'd had to leave Clint at at the mansion; since what they were doing was illegal, they didn't want to drag an Avenger into this, and they really didn't want to do it with an alternate universe version of an Avenger. This universe's Clint Barton would probably prefer to be left out of this. So it was just the five of them, plus Lockheed. Just another late night on the job.
Cyclops	"Kitty's on point," Cyclops said as the Blackbird flew in over the Benetech labs. The lines of mutants either protesting or waiting for a cure was visible even from here. "They've got the deluxe detection package in there, so you'll want to start from below."
Beast	"Security mainframe should be housed in the basement," Beast added. "Think you can disable it without tripping anything?"
Kitty	"It's done," Kitty assured them. She could break electronics with the best of them, but she'd also had to learn how to deal with them without breaking anything by accident.
Wolverine	"When do I get to disable something?" Wolverine asked. He had good priorities.
Emma	"Oh, sheathe it, will you?" Emma said. "Inspiring costumes notwithstanding, we're not heroes tonight. Let's try to be subtle for once."
Beast	Subtle it was. It was Kitty's job to get them in. Sneak past the guards, disable the cameras, and then head back out to phase everyone else into the building. Emma was the last one she brought through, and when they arrived through the wall, Beast was saying, "Place is a bit of a maze, but the main research center is definitely up top."
Emma	"God, but that is unnerving," Emma said, snatching her arm out of Kitty's grasp the second they were clear.
Kitty	"Wriggle like that next time and I'll lose my grip in the middle of a wall," Kitty warned. Not threatened, much as she'd like to. "You'll fuse molecules. As deaths go, it's not the funnest."
Wolverine	"Three guards on this floor," Wolverine said from a doorway. "They came over all sleepy just now."
Cyclops	"Teams," Cyclops said. "We work every floor."
Kitty	Beast and Wolverine went together, and Cyclops and Emma, and Kitty and Lockheed headed to the basement. Kitty started phasing down through the floor, but it felt... not right. "Okay, this is weird. It's metal, Lockheed, and I can't find the end. There's no sub-basement. It just goes down. You stay here and don't eat anyone," she said, giving her dragon a little pet. "I'm gonna check it out." Yeah, Kitty decided the further down she phased, this was definitely weird. She'd run into something sooner or later, usually. If you phased through the ground, you'd start seeing things buried the further you went. If you went through a building, you'd see structure or wiring or something. There was nothing here. She had no idea how long it took her to reach the end, but she was glad she didn't need to hold her breath as long as she was phasing anymore. By the time she got to where she was going, a metallic cavern-looking place, she was so relieved that she fell out of the ceiling and hit the ground kind of hard. That must've been a hundred feet solid, and it definitely felt wrong. Whatever she phased through, it wasn't from this planet, or any one she'd ever been to. She just hoped the molecular structure didn't damage her, because she did not like the way she felt. "Job to do," she muttered to herself, getting up. "Keep it together." She peeked around the first corner she found, hearing voices up ahead. There was a team of four men with guns, security for the facility probably. "Alpha team has hostiles contained upstairs," one was saying. "No sign of breach, but we're on red, just in case. No one gets near the subject." Except for Kitty, obviously. She passed them without alerting them to her presence, and continued toward a vault. Alien or no, there wasn't a lock she couldn't pop. And if the 'contained hostiles' meant the rest of the X-Men, it was up to her to find out the truth about this place. So she stuck her hand through the lock until she heard the click of it unlocking, and began to open the vault door when she heard, "Drop her! Drop her!" And then the shooting started. It was an automatic reflex that she phased whenever she heard shooting, and it was a good thing because one of the bullets passed right through her chest, hitting something behind her with a metallic kling sound. Except wait, she'd opened the door...
What up, Colossus?	Kitty turned, and saw an all-too familiar silver metal form looming over her. It didn't even matter that the guards were still shooting her- or through her, anyway, and bouncing off him- because she was staring in shock at the armored face of Piotr Rasputin, and there had been absolutely no part of her that was prepared to ever see that again.
Kitty	She was still staring at where he'd been standing, still in shock, when he rushed ahead, passing through her without a thought, even as the bullets continued to ricochet off of him. She was still staring at where he'd been standing, still in shock, when she realized the shooting had stopped. The sounds of a fight, however, were definitely a thing that was happening. When she turned, she saw that he had slammed a guard's face into the wall, and then he was picking up another, throwing him as hard as he could into the third... "Peter," she finally managed, and forced herself to find her voice and be louder. "Stop! Peter!"
Peter	He wasn't stopping, and the fourth hit a wall. None of the guards were getting up. Obviously Peter had some things he needed to work out, and these guards were getting all of it.
Kitty	Kitty ran towards him, insisting, "Please stop. You'll kill them."
Peter	He turned on her, snarling, but then it looked like he finally saw her, and he dropped the armor, leaving him in his normal form. "Katya?" he said, and sunk to his knees in front of her, wrapping his arms around her waist and sobbing. "Oh, god. Finally... am I finally dead?"
Kitty	She held him and let him cry it out, still not sure how any of this was happening. None of this felt real, and she still had absolutely no idea how to respond to this. When he'd settled down, she'd helped him up and sat him down inside the vault while she went to check to make sure he didn't actually kill anyone. When she returned, she took a seat on the other side of said vault, and for a long moment they just looked at each other in silence. Yep. That was her former boyfriend, friend and one of the most important people she'd ever had in her life sitting across from her, wearing little more than the shorts they'd stuck on him while he'd been in here. She was maybe going to leave that part out when she had to tell Clint about this later. "I'm gonna need a minute here," Kitty said finally, and promptly started babbling. "Before I can get us out, I'm gonna need to rest. It's hard getting through this metal, and taking you along... It's gonna be a little-"
Peter	"You look different," Peter interrupted.
Kitty	A little thrown off guard- let's pretend she even had a guard here- Kitty said, "Well, yeah. I am."
Peter	"Has it been very long, then?" He was still trying to work things out here himself. He didn't even have a sense of time.
Kitty	Three years. It'd been three years. That was another thing Kitty couldn't begin to deal with yet. She couldn't imagine how he was gonna. "I'm sorry," she said, ignoring that. "You have to know that if you're a clone or a robot or yeah, a ghost or an alternate universe thingie I can deal, but if you are some shapeshifter or illusionist who's just watching me twist I will kill you I will kill you with an axe so right away just prove it. Say something. Show me something. I can't-"
Peter	Any doubts Peter was having that this wasn't real were kind of fading watching her freak out. If his subconscious would show him that, he had more problems than he thought, for one. "Katya-"
Kitty	"You died!" she exploded, standing abruptly without even realizing she was doing it. "Peter Rasputin died and I know because I carried his ashes to Russia and scattered them myself!"
Peter	"You did?" he asked, and looked down for a moment before meeting her eye again. "Thank you."
Kitty	Here she was yelling, and he was the one who'd been dead all this time. She felt bad about the yelling along with everything else now, and turned away again. "I'm so sorry. You need my help and I'm... "
Peter	"They switched my body with someone else, I think," Peter said, putting his hand on her shoulder to get her to look at him again. "Revived me and, and brought me here. I don't know whose ashes. I am not a trick."
Kitty	"I know. I mean, I think that I-" Maybe she really did know, and that was what was freaking her out so much. There was a lot to deal with if that was really him, and her being her, she was flailing and not wanting to deal. But she reached up and brought her hand to his cheek, and he felt entirely real. That really was him. "I know."
Peter	He gave her the tiniest of smiles and placed his hand over hers. "I can feel your hand and I become certain I am also not a ghost."
Kitty	This poor guy. "Okay," Kitty said, pulling her hand back before it got weird and taking a deep breath. She could continue her freakout when she finally got him out of here. "So, rescue. Do you know any other way out besides up? I don't think these guys came down through a hundred feet of metal. Do you-"
Peter	"No. I only know the room," Peter said, and he wasn't looking at her again. "Always dark. Inside. Cold. They kept me strong and healthy... I pounded the walls every day. Every minute. For years. Was it years...?" He saw her nod, and that was another terrible thing he was going to have to deal with later. "They did tests. Every few days the gas would come, and I would wake on the table. They would cut at me, inject... things... All I saw were their masks. And him. The one who brought me back. He said my death had saved mankind from the Legacy virus, and for that I'd pay with my life. Is that true? The Legacy virus?"
Kitty	Kitty nodded again. His little sister Illyana had died from it, and when the time came for a cure, he decided to sacrifice himself for it. At least he didn't go through all of this in vain, though that wasn't really a consolation. "Gone," she said. "You did save us. From that. Listen, we need to get out of here. It's going to take forever to get back up there, and the rest of the team sounds like they're in trouble. So we need to be going."

Hisako	While the X-Men were off doing what X-Men did, the students at the school got to do what they did. And if you were Hisako, what she did was head towards the bathrooms in her pajamas to get ready for bed, with Wing flying along next to her. "There's no way they're actually going to let us go along," she was telling him.
Wing	"I didn't say that," Wing protested, maybe a smidge too quickly. "What are you, a mind-reader now?" Maybe that didn't help his 'I didn't say that' case?
Hisako	"No, but Blindfold is. She said the only reason you came here was you wanna make X-Man," Hisako said, and seeing his expression, assured him, "Hey, join the club. Apart from the losers lining up for that bogus cure, who doesn't wanna make the A-list?"
Wing	"Blindfold, man," Wing sighed, dropping down from the air so he could walk next to her. "No eyes, big mouth."
Hisako	"She's a blabber, yeah. But she's okay," Hisako told him. "I think she's really lonely. I mean, think about it for a minute-"
Ord	As they turned the corner, they almost ran right into a tall, imposing reptilian figure with half of his face scarred from a certain purple dragon. "Minute's up," Ord smiled. It should go without saying that it was not a nice smile. "Where are the X-Men?"
Wing	"Uhhh, they're not here," Wing said, not sure if he should be scared or not.
Ord	Ord looked from him, to the girl. "Really?"
Wing	"I saw the X-plane take off like two hours ago," Wing offered.
Ord	"And you don't know where they went," Ord said, facepalming. His timing could be so much better. Like two hours better.
Hisako	"A mission, or something... I mean, they don't really tell us stuff like that," Hisako replied. "Did you wanna leave them a message, or... Oh, god, that's so stupid..."
Clint	Since he'd arrived, Clint had been monitoring things at the school as much as he could, but that was mostly out of habit. After the rest of the grownups left though (Clint had wanted to go, but breaking and entering in another person's dimension, especially when there was another version of him running around, seemed like a not great idea), he'd started outright skulking around on self-imposed guard duty. The telepaths probably knew where he was, but the ugly new guy didn't, and Clint had no problem using that to his advantage. He peered around the corner and down the hallway, trying to find a weak spot in the guy's armor that he could use to take him down. The kids were very much in the way, but after fighting beside Kitty so many times, Clint was used to mutants not getting out of harm's way when they should.
Wing	"We're not X-Men," Wing said, because the green guy was still there and everything was awkward. "We're just kids and um... you could come back..." That was maybe dumber than leaving a message.
Clint	"Or he could just leave," Clint said, coming around the corner, bow drawn. "We have got to teach you kids the finer points of being impolite to intruders."
Ord	"There's an X-Man," said Ord triumphantly. He was not exactly working off of a roster here.
Clint	"Somewhere, Emma just felt a little nauseous," Clint said, taking a step closer to the kids. "Who the hell are you?"
Ord	"Ord of Breakworld," he sneered. "Cute weapon."
Clint	"Yeah, I really trust a guy who looks like you to know what 'cute' means," Clint said, trying to keep a neutral expression. Kitty had told him about this Ord guy - and that Lockheed was responsible for how he looked, well done little dragon - and Clint knew enough to know him being here wasn't good. "You'll see how cute it is when you've got some holes in you, or you can get the hell out before I shoot."
Ord	Ord looked hugely bothered, really. Or wait, no, he was smiling. "I'll leave. But first I have a message for you X-Men." Still talking to the wrong person, dude.
Clint	Oh yeah, that sounded so promising to Clint. "Let me get a piece of paper. Or not," he said. "What do you want?"
Ord	Wing had figured out that maybe, just maybe, he shouldn't be standing between the weird alien guy and the guy with the bow, and had started to inch away. Of course, that just meant it was a little more satisfying when Ord grabbed him with one hand, and used the needles attached to the gauntlet he was wearing on the other hand to stab him in the back with it. "That," he said, tossing Wing towards the wall.
Clint	Clint let out a sharp set of swear words that he was going to regret saying in front of the kids later, and fired at Ord's chest where his armor was weaker. He should have just shot him to begin with instead of trying to be reasonable, and he knew he was going to be replaying this again in his head later to rethink his choices.
Ord	While Hisako was running over to make sure Wing was still breathing, since he wasn't moving, Ord winced, but pulled the arrow back out of his chest. It hurt, but it helped to look badass. "That stung." He also pulled the circular disc weapon of his out, since that looked badass, too. It'd cut Wolverine almost in half, this should be easy.
Clint	That weapon looked seriously un-fun, but Clint was grateful that he seemed to have Ord's attention instead of him focusing on Wing and Hisako. "I was hoping it'd tickle a little," Clint said, hitting one of the buttons on his bow before pulling out another arrow and firing at Ord's chest again. Maybe an electric arrow would slow him down?
Ord	Ord thought it was just another arrow, so it wasn't till he started feeling the shocks that he realized that something was wrong, and he was not enjoying this so much.
Clint	Clint took the opportunity to run over to Hisako and Wing. "Is he all right? You've got to get out of here."
Hisako	"He's okay, I think," Hisako said, already armoring up. "I can get rid of him. I got this." And the green guy deserved all the punchings.
Clint	Yes, yes he did deserve punchings, and Clint was just going to stare as Hisako armored up. Why was it always the sweet, innocent-looking ones who were secretly super scary? "Are you sure?"
Hisako	Nope! "Yep!" Hisako said, getting up and stalking over to Ord, who was pulling the arrow out and starting to recover already. If she wasn't freaked out and didn't have adrenaline working for her, she might think this was a bad idea! "He's not even an X-Man, you jerk!" she said, and punched him with enough force to knock him out the window.
Clint	So, making Hisako angry was clearly a thing Clint needed to never, ever do. That was a good lesson learned right there. "You didn't need to tell him that. You could have mentioned I'm an Avenger instead." Not that he felt like much of one letting Wing get hurt, but still. Clint swung his bow over his shoulder and looked back at Hisako. "We've got to get out of here and get word to the actual X-Men about what happened."
Wing	But first, they had to deal with Wing waking up and suddenly bolting upright. "Wait! What did I..."
Clint	"Whoa there, don't try to get up," Clint said quickly. He didn't have a good medical reason to keep Wing from getting up, but that seemed like something people usually said when talking to someone who'd been knocked unconscious. Not that Clint had experience with that or anything. "It's all right, he's gone. How do you feel?"
Wing	Given that he knew he'd just gotten stabbed with something, Wing... totally tried to get up, but not in the normal way. And when he couldn't... "Oh god. Oh no. My powers... I'm cured."
Clint	Clint opened his mouth to tell Wing it would be okay, and then stopped because how could he say that if he didn't know it was true. "We're going to get the others to come back. They'll--they'll know what to do." Even if there wasn't anything to do.

[NFB, NFI, OOC okay! Taken from Astonishing X-Men #3-6 and preplayed with the lovely and wonderful

so_hawkward!]