Kitty Pryde-Barton (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
throughaphase) wrote2012-10-11 12:39 pm
throughaphase) wrote2012-10-11 12:39 pm
Mt. Haven- Wednesday afternoon
So far, Kitty was spending a lot of her time unconscious, and given the pain she was in and everything that happened when she woke up, she really would have rathered stay unconscious.
She didn't really know what was happening. She knew everything hurt, that it felt like every single bit of her was coming apart. When she woke up, it was only to start screaming in pain because she'd come to just in time for more convulsions. There was a woman trying to hold her down on what felt like a metal table by herself, yelling for help and telling Kitty not to fight her, that this was only a sedative. And when Kitty became aware that she had a syringe headed for her, that just freaked her out more, and she sat up, phasing through the woman to escape the table.
Kitty landed half outside of the glass examination box that she'd just phased through, landing her literally face to face with a half-rotted corpse. "Oh my god," she gasped. And then she realized this wasn't the only body strewn about. She was surrounded by them. "Oh my god."
She pushed herself up into a kneeling position, feeling the pain starting to fade away, realizing tears had been streaming down her face without her even noticing. She never wanted to feel anything like that again. "What is this place?" she asked, looking around now that she could. The lights were mostly out, making it look even more like some kind of underground industrial complex gone macabre. "Who are all these people? Why are they dead?"
Kitty saw Paul inside the glass box, but he seemed to be ignoring her. "Reverend? Paul? Are you okay?"
When he finally spoke, he said, "What have you done?"
She looked back, seeing the tiger-striped woman who'd been trying to hold her down, half-collapsed against the glass. "I'm sorry," Kitty replied, fully used to people not understanding her power when they saw it in action. "It wasn't intentional- all I did was phase through her. But that's no biggie, I do that all the time. It shouldn't cause her any-"
The woman slumped against the glass and slid to the floor, and suddenly this whole situation had just gotten worse.
She reached into the glass, pulling the woman out like maybe she could help her since all Paul was doing was standing there in shock. "Oh, no, please no," she begged, seeing the blood pouring from the woman's eyes and nose and knowing this wasn't something CPR was going to fix. This time the tears were there for a reason. "I'm so sorry. Please."
"You... touched her!" Paul said, accusatory. "And she died!"
"I didn't mean to!" Kitty said, reaching up to him.
He backed away as far as he could, hitting the exam table. "Get away from me!"
"Don't leave me!" Kitty cried. "Look at all this equipment! Aren't there any doctors here? There must be some way we can help-" And just like that, the pain was coming back. Kitty dropped the body she'd been cradling, finding that the best possible option right now was to curl up on the floor and wish it was over soon. "Paul, please," she pleaded, "something's terribly wrong. I'm tearing apart inside-"
When she looked up, it was just in time to see Paul hit the ground unconscious after being hit in the head with a butt of a gun, held by Stryker. In the silver suit.
"So I wasn't hallucinating," Kitty said, not sure whether that was a good thing or not.
"Stealth mode, child," Stryker answered. "Kept me hidden, kept me safe, while you led me right to the heart of my objective." He walked over to a control board that Kitty hadn't even noticed- she'd been a little busy here- and a moment later said angrily, "There's no power! The entire network's crashed!"
"Like I care?" Kitty sniffed. She wasn't entirely positive she wasn't dying here, she'd accidentally killed someone with her powers for the first time ever and she wasn't great with killing people to begin with, there were dead bodies all over, she had no idea what Stryker wanted with her or with this place...
"You're the gearhead, Ms. Pryde. Fix it!" he snapped.
"Yeah, right," she said, still staring at the dead woman's body like if she hoped hard enough, she could fix that.
She heard the gun click, and Stryker stepped forward to aim it at her forehead. She'd been in this position before with him, and if he thought she'd gotten afraid of him pulling the trigger in the last six years... "You'd rather be dead?" he challenged.
"Go to hell."
He swung his arm around to point the gun at Paul, still laying unconscious. "You'd rather he be dead?"
Dammit. "Son of a-"
"When I have to be," Stryker cut her off. "Consider yourself lucky even monsters have their uses."
"I'm not a monster!" Kitty shot back.
Stryker pointedly glanced at the woman's body. "Yeah, right."
"It was an accident," she said through gritted teeth.
"Does that really matter?"
She hated him. She really, truly hated him. It did get her to get up and wipe at her eyes, though, heading to the console... and having to move a dead guy away from it before she could work. It was going to be that kind of day.
Taking something apart and figuring out how it worked and how to fix it was easy for her. It was a lot harder to work on the system with Stryker talking while she worked. He explained some things, like escaping his headquarters- wherever that was, wherever she'd been before- because his "associate" has lost control of her powers. That made Kitty wonder if he really wasn't at the point of working with/using mutants like her somehow. It really bothered her when she started quoting Bible verses at her, though, because he was using it as his rationalization. What was the obsession with the Bible here?
"You're a minister of God, Stryker. Why do you hate us?" she finally had to ask.
"Darwin would say the planet isn't big enough for both our species. My view's more fundamental," Stryker replied. "I look into the mirror. I see the face of man that's unchanged since the Garden of Eden. You ask me to accept that mutants are cast from the same template? If that's true, why haven't those faces been around from the beginning?"
Ugh. For his argument to be correct, anyone with mutations like albinism or sickle cell anemia or even blue eyes should be wiped out because that wasn't originally what God put on Earth. Considering Stryker was blue-eyed himself, she figured he didn't buy into that. "So what you're saying is to be human, you have to look the part?" she asked.
"To be human, child, you simply have to be human," he said.
"Have you considered that there may be more to God and His plans than you comprehend?" Kitty challenged.
"And perhaps there's a devil as well, who also has plans."
"The key, of course, is knowing which is which."
"'Now the serpent was more subtle than any beasts of the field which the Lord God had made,'" he quoted.
Kitty fixed him with her best 'bitch please' face. "Is that what I am to you?" she asked. "A serpent?"
"If the skin fits. Look at that creature," he said, gesturing to the woman Kitty had killed. "What do we possibly have in common? Mutants not only celebrate their differences from human society, more and more they deny them outright!"
"And why shouldn't we?" Kitty said, standing from where she'd been crouched working. "You proclaim us monsters, you tell people it's God's will to exterminate us on sight. Why are you so surprised when some of us take you at your word and reply in kind? You helped sow this wind, Stryker. Quit bitching now the time's come to reap the whirlwind."
"Less talk, Pryde, more work," Stryker said, like he hadn't even heard her.
Kitty made a show of dusting off her hands. "I'm done here. Whoever killed this system- killed this whole complex- did a total job. It's dead."
"Apt choice of words," he said, raising his arm to once again point the gun at her head. This now made the third time he'd done that to her. "If you're no more use to me-"
"I've heard enough."
At that voice, Kitty and Stryker both turned to the source and saw Paul standing, perfectly all right, like nothing had happened to him. "'And when the Lord God shall deliver them before thee, thou shalt smite them,'" he said, right as he grabbed the gun from Stryker's hand and sent him flying with some sort of energy bolt.
When Stryker didn't pop up again immediately, Kitty phased through the containers he'd fallen behind to look for him. She'd gotten herself halfway through it before the pain came back worse than before, and it was almost a relief to curl up on the floor like that would somehow help, even if it was uncomfortably close to a corpse. Whatever was happening to her, there had to be a reason for it. Was this what happened to all these people? To Stryker's associate? Did it have something to do with her phasing?
She must have made some kind of sound, because Paul sounded really startled when he made his way over the mere mortal way. "Kitty! Are you all right?"
Oh, come on. "If you have to ask, Reverend Paul, you haven't been paying attention," she bit out, trying to pull herself up. She'd start with the kneeling position, and then work her way into standing... in a second. With the help of one of those crates. "I'm being eaten alive, one cell at a time. By critters whose teeth are coated with acid."
"Where's Stryker?"
"Gone. You didn't hit him hard enough." And... standing. Good job, Kitty! Gold star!
"I don't understand. How can that be?"
"Same way he snuck in here unnoticed," she said, spotting a gun laying on the floor next to the body. "With that damn armored stealth suit he's wearing, he could be standing right beside us and we wouldn't know it."
"'The Lord that delivered me out of the paw of the lion and out of the paw of the bear, he will deliver me out of the hand of this Philistine,'" Paul replied.
She hurt way too much to be dealing with Bible study constantly right now. "If you say so," she said, bending while Paul's back was turned to pick up the gun and sliding it into the waistband at the back of her skirt. "Me, I prefer the maxim ''The Lord helps those who help themselves.'" With that done, she brought her hands up to pull the band out of her hair, both to hide that movement and because the ponytail wasn't really doing its job anymore.
"What now?" Paul asked.
"Best way to find the man is to know more about the hunting ground," she replied, and without questioning it, Paul began leading her through the rest of the complex, which would allow her to see more of how this place worked. It was a massive structure, with several levels, and bodies strewn everywhere. Paul acted like he didn't even notice them. Everything still hurt- that didn't seem to go away now- but it had dimmed enough to deal with and that was the important part, because all the clues to what was going on had to be here.
"What brought you here, Reverend?" she asked once they'd walked a while.
"I was always here. This was my home," Paul told her.
"I figured that," she admitted. "But building a complex like this must have been a pretty big job. I mean, your own church provides a major access point. Didn't anyone ask questions? Or... were you part of it? Which came first, Reverend? The town? Or this complex?"
Paul stopped for a second, but didn't answer.
Fine. "This place is totally self-contained," Kitty went on, gesturing to the tanks they were walking past. "Power comes from these geo-thermal taps. That means no link to the state power grid. That's very neat. The only way in is along back roads winding through some pretty hairy mountains. No land line phones, no cellular links, no dishes for satellite uplinks. Tell me, does this town even officially exist?"
Paul led her down a flight of stairs, finally speaking. "Does that matter?"
"Not if you want to disappear. Trouble is, that word covers a lot of territory. You call a place Mt. Haven, you create certain expectations," she said, going to the consoles on this floor to start snooping around. "Hey, you ever hear the joke about God and the Jews?"
"I beg your pardon?" he asked, sounding startled.
"If we're his chosen people, how come he had us wander in the wilderness for forty years before leading us to the only land in the neighborhood that didn't have any oil?"
Paul didn't take it as a joke as much as a question to be answered. Kitty'd expected him to. "Perhaps they were not worthy?" he said. "Perhaps they hadn't learned their lesson."
"Good point. Makes you think," Kitty said, still looking around and feeling like she was on to something here. "Y'see, once people arrive, no one outside this valley will ever know what happened to them. Now, that can be a good thing. God knows mutants could use a sanctuary. But that wasn't the purpose here, was it? Not at the beginning."
And there it was, right on one of the desks. The little piece of information she'd been looking for, even if she wasn't entirely sure why she'd been looking for it yet. She was just going with it here. "Hey, you know whose name's been in the news lately? Aaron Pankow. He was this mass murderer who went after mutants. They just executed him," Kitty continued, stepping away from the desk and back towards Paul to show the nameplate she'd just found, which read- of course- Aaron Pankow, with Director of Strategic Analysis under his name. "What happened, Paul, somebody object to staying? Or maybe object to what was being done?"
"I... I don't know what you mean."
"That's a damned lie, and you, sir, are a damnable liar!" boomed a third voice as Stryker came out of stealth mode. Kitty hated that suit, she really did. "Come with me, girl," Stryker said, looking at her. "There's something you have to see."
Kitty had no reason to trust either one of them at this point, but she wanted answers, so she and Paul followed Stryker down another four levels. "Haven't you wondered about the townspeople, girl?" Stryker asked. "Kids galore, and all of them mutants. No adults, no human beings. Where'd they go?"
And the floor of this level was covered in bodies. It wasn't just a few laying here and there, like they could have been workers who might have just been trapped in here when there was some kind of accident. No, you could hardly see the floor here. She could have blamed the others on some terrible accident, but this made it look like people had been kept here on purpose, and trapped here, and murdered.
"Now we know," Stryker said.
"Paul, what happened here?" Kitty asked quietly, even though she had a sneaking suspicion she knew.
"Smart girl like you, isn't it obvious?" Stryker bit out.
"Like you have a right to talk," Kitty snapped. That 'no human beings' comment had struck a nerve. "You tried to turn the whole world into a boneyard like this! Or do the bodies not matter when they're mutants?"
"Look around, Pryde. Face my reality. My race is fighting for its very survival. What else do you expect?"
"It's my race, too!"
"Kitty, why are you arguing with it?" Paul asked, sounding confused.
And now she was confused, too. "I beg your pardon? Paul, he's not an it, he's a man. As twisted and misguided as they come, maybe, but a human being regardless."
"How can that be? Humans possess souls. Monsters have none."
Okay. She was past confusion and fully into that horrified feeling you got when you realized something had just gone totally off the rails. "What are you talking about?"
"There's a light inside you," Paul explained. "Inside all my people in Mt. Haven, like the stars in the heavens. In some, it's very bright. Yours is... strange. The radiance is very special, but sometimes it's hard to perceive, almost as if it's playing hide-and-seek. The Stryker creature has no light."
"Paul, all that means is that they're not mutants," Kitty explained.
"What are mutants?"
Oh, what was happening here. "People like me," she answered slowly, "people like the kids in town, people like you... don't you know?"
"Of course he knows," Stryker said, getting up from where he'd been kneeling on the landing by the bodies. Genuflecting might have been a better word for it, under the circumstances. "My God, girl, are you totally blind? Who do you think is responsible? Everyone who lived here, everyone who's come here since, everyone who isn't a mutant. He's killed them all." And with that, he handed Kitty the child's toy bear he'd found with the bodies.
Oh, God. She didn't know what Paul's deal was, but she really didn't want to believe she'd spent her day with a mass murderer. "Paul?"
"Kitty, are we not charged to defend the righteous against the ungodly?" Paul asked, completely calm.
For the life of her, Kitty did not understand why people kept using that argument to kill anyone who disagreed with them. Yes, please cite the Bible and then go ahead and disobey the fifth commandment because you were convinced you were in the right, sure. "But they were innocent!"
"They are monsters," Paul insisted. "They have no place in the Lord's creation."
"I couldn't have said so myself," Stryker said, taking advantage of Kitty's distracted state and grabbing her from behind to touch the collar around her neck. To her shock, the same sort of silver metal suit that Stryker had been wearing enveloped her. And now she knew where she'd gotten the collar. "He's been keeping his distance from you since you first met," he told her. "The poor monster seems morally afraid of you. Let's find out why, shall we?"
He pushed her towards Paul so hard that she stumbled on a stair. Kitty's automatic reaction to that sort of thing was to phase, to avoid any obstacles for both her safety and that of anyone around her.
Which didn't work so well when the person you were trying to phase through was electronic, and you were a walking techbane. Instead of just shorting anything out, though, it brought a whole different kind of pain this time, right before she blacked out.
[NFB, NFI, OOC okay. From X-Treme X-Men #28 and 29. Seriously, stay awake for five minutes, please.]
She didn't really know what was happening. She knew everything hurt, that it felt like every single bit of her was coming apart. When she woke up, it was only to start screaming in pain because she'd come to just in time for more convulsions. There was a woman trying to hold her down on what felt like a metal table by herself, yelling for help and telling Kitty not to fight her, that this was only a sedative. And when Kitty became aware that she had a syringe headed for her, that just freaked her out more, and she sat up, phasing through the woman to escape the table.
Kitty landed half outside of the glass examination box that she'd just phased through, landing her literally face to face with a half-rotted corpse. "Oh my god," she gasped. And then she realized this wasn't the only body strewn about. She was surrounded by them. "Oh my god."
She pushed herself up into a kneeling position, feeling the pain starting to fade away, realizing tears had been streaming down her face without her even noticing. She never wanted to feel anything like that again. "What is this place?" she asked, looking around now that she could. The lights were mostly out, making it look even more like some kind of underground industrial complex gone macabre. "Who are all these people? Why are they dead?"
Kitty saw Paul inside the glass box, but he seemed to be ignoring her. "Reverend? Paul? Are you okay?"
When he finally spoke, he said, "What have you done?"
She looked back, seeing the tiger-striped woman who'd been trying to hold her down, half-collapsed against the glass. "I'm sorry," Kitty replied, fully used to people not understanding her power when they saw it in action. "It wasn't intentional- all I did was phase through her. But that's no biggie, I do that all the time. It shouldn't cause her any-"
The woman slumped against the glass and slid to the floor, and suddenly this whole situation had just gotten worse.
She reached into the glass, pulling the woman out like maybe she could help her since all Paul was doing was standing there in shock. "Oh, no, please no," she begged, seeing the blood pouring from the woman's eyes and nose and knowing this wasn't something CPR was going to fix. This time the tears were there for a reason. "I'm so sorry. Please."
"You... touched her!" Paul said, accusatory. "And she died!"
"I didn't mean to!" Kitty said, reaching up to him.
He backed away as far as he could, hitting the exam table. "Get away from me!"
"Don't leave me!" Kitty cried. "Look at all this equipment! Aren't there any doctors here? There must be some way we can help-" And just like that, the pain was coming back. Kitty dropped the body she'd been cradling, finding that the best possible option right now was to curl up on the floor and wish it was over soon. "Paul, please," she pleaded, "something's terribly wrong. I'm tearing apart inside-"
When she looked up, it was just in time to see Paul hit the ground unconscious after being hit in the head with a butt of a gun, held by Stryker. In the silver suit.
"So I wasn't hallucinating," Kitty said, not sure whether that was a good thing or not.
"Stealth mode, child," Stryker answered. "Kept me hidden, kept me safe, while you led me right to the heart of my objective." He walked over to a control board that Kitty hadn't even noticed- she'd been a little busy here- and a moment later said angrily, "There's no power! The entire network's crashed!"
"Like I care?" Kitty sniffed. She wasn't entirely positive she wasn't dying here, she'd accidentally killed someone with her powers for the first time ever and she wasn't great with killing people to begin with, there were dead bodies all over, she had no idea what Stryker wanted with her or with this place...
"You're the gearhead, Ms. Pryde. Fix it!" he snapped.
"Yeah, right," she said, still staring at the dead woman's body like if she hoped hard enough, she could fix that.
She heard the gun click, and Stryker stepped forward to aim it at her forehead. She'd been in this position before with him, and if he thought she'd gotten afraid of him pulling the trigger in the last six years... "You'd rather be dead?" he challenged.
"Go to hell."
He swung his arm around to point the gun at Paul, still laying unconscious. "You'd rather he be dead?"
Dammit. "Son of a-"
"When I have to be," Stryker cut her off. "Consider yourself lucky even monsters have their uses."
"I'm not a monster!" Kitty shot back.
Stryker pointedly glanced at the woman's body. "Yeah, right."
"It was an accident," she said through gritted teeth.
"Does that really matter?"
She hated him. She really, truly hated him. It did get her to get up and wipe at her eyes, though, heading to the console... and having to move a dead guy away from it before she could work. It was going to be that kind of day.
Taking something apart and figuring out how it worked and how to fix it was easy for her. It was a lot harder to work on the system with Stryker talking while she worked. He explained some things, like escaping his headquarters- wherever that was, wherever she'd been before- because his "associate" has lost control of her powers. That made Kitty wonder if he really wasn't at the point of working with/using mutants like her somehow. It really bothered her when she started quoting Bible verses at her, though, because he was using it as his rationalization. What was the obsession with the Bible here?
"You're a minister of God, Stryker. Why do you hate us?" she finally had to ask.
"Darwin would say the planet isn't big enough for both our species. My view's more fundamental," Stryker replied. "I look into the mirror. I see the face of man that's unchanged since the Garden of Eden. You ask me to accept that mutants are cast from the same template? If that's true, why haven't those faces been around from the beginning?"
Ugh. For his argument to be correct, anyone with mutations like albinism or sickle cell anemia or even blue eyes should be wiped out because that wasn't originally what God put on Earth. Considering Stryker was blue-eyed himself, she figured he didn't buy into that. "So what you're saying is to be human, you have to look the part?" she asked.
"To be human, child, you simply have to be human," he said.
"Have you considered that there may be more to God and His plans than you comprehend?" Kitty challenged.
"And perhaps there's a devil as well, who also has plans."
"The key, of course, is knowing which is which."
"'Now the serpent was more subtle than any beasts of the field which the Lord God had made,'" he quoted.
Kitty fixed him with her best 'bitch please' face. "Is that what I am to you?" she asked. "A serpent?"
"If the skin fits. Look at that creature," he said, gesturing to the woman Kitty had killed. "What do we possibly have in common? Mutants not only celebrate their differences from human society, more and more they deny them outright!"
"And why shouldn't we?" Kitty said, standing from where she'd been crouched working. "You proclaim us monsters, you tell people it's God's will to exterminate us on sight. Why are you so surprised when some of us take you at your word and reply in kind? You helped sow this wind, Stryker. Quit bitching now the time's come to reap the whirlwind."
"Less talk, Pryde, more work," Stryker said, like he hadn't even heard her.
Kitty made a show of dusting off her hands. "I'm done here. Whoever killed this system- killed this whole complex- did a total job. It's dead."
"Apt choice of words," he said, raising his arm to once again point the gun at her head. This now made the third time he'd done that to her. "If you're no more use to me-"
"I've heard enough."
At that voice, Kitty and Stryker both turned to the source and saw Paul standing, perfectly all right, like nothing had happened to him. "'And when the Lord God shall deliver them before thee, thou shalt smite them,'" he said, right as he grabbed the gun from Stryker's hand and sent him flying with some sort of energy bolt.
When Stryker didn't pop up again immediately, Kitty phased through the containers he'd fallen behind to look for him. She'd gotten herself halfway through it before the pain came back worse than before, and it was almost a relief to curl up on the floor like that would somehow help, even if it was uncomfortably close to a corpse. Whatever was happening to her, there had to be a reason for it. Was this what happened to all these people? To Stryker's associate? Did it have something to do with her phasing?
She must have made some kind of sound, because Paul sounded really startled when he made his way over the mere mortal way. "Kitty! Are you all right?"
Oh, come on. "If you have to ask, Reverend Paul, you haven't been paying attention," she bit out, trying to pull herself up. She'd start with the kneeling position, and then work her way into standing... in a second. With the help of one of those crates. "I'm being eaten alive, one cell at a time. By critters whose teeth are coated with acid."
"Where's Stryker?"
"Gone. You didn't hit him hard enough." And... standing. Good job, Kitty! Gold star!
"I don't understand. How can that be?"
"Same way he snuck in here unnoticed," she said, spotting a gun laying on the floor next to the body. "With that damn armored stealth suit he's wearing, he could be standing right beside us and we wouldn't know it."
"'The Lord that delivered me out of the paw of the lion and out of the paw of the bear, he will deliver me out of the hand of this Philistine,'" Paul replied.
She hurt way too much to be dealing with Bible study constantly right now. "If you say so," she said, bending while Paul's back was turned to pick up the gun and sliding it into the waistband at the back of her skirt. "Me, I prefer the maxim ''The Lord helps those who help themselves.'" With that done, she brought her hands up to pull the band out of her hair, both to hide that movement and because the ponytail wasn't really doing its job anymore.
"What now?" Paul asked.
"Best way to find the man is to know more about the hunting ground," she replied, and without questioning it, Paul began leading her through the rest of the complex, which would allow her to see more of how this place worked. It was a massive structure, with several levels, and bodies strewn everywhere. Paul acted like he didn't even notice them. Everything still hurt- that didn't seem to go away now- but it had dimmed enough to deal with and that was the important part, because all the clues to what was going on had to be here.
"What brought you here, Reverend?" she asked once they'd walked a while.
"I was always here. This was my home," Paul told her.
"I figured that," she admitted. "But building a complex like this must have been a pretty big job. I mean, your own church provides a major access point. Didn't anyone ask questions? Or... were you part of it? Which came first, Reverend? The town? Or this complex?"
Paul stopped for a second, but didn't answer.
Fine. "This place is totally self-contained," Kitty went on, gesturing to the tanks they were walking past. "Power comes from these geo-thermal taps. That means no link to the state power grid. That's very neat. The only way in is along back roads winding through some pretty hairy mountains. No land line phones, no cellular links, no dishes for satellite uplinks. Tell me, does this town even officially exist?"
Paul led her down a flight of stairs, finally speaking. "Does that matter?"
"Not if you want to disappear. Trouble is, that word covers a lot of territory. You call a place Mt. Haven, you create certain expectations," she said, going to the consoles on this floor to start snooping around. "Hey, you ever hear the joke about God and the Jews?"
"I beg your pardon?" he asked, sounding startled.
"If we're his chosen people, how come he had us wander in the wilderness for forty years before leading us to the only land in the neighborhood that didn't have any oil?"
Paul didn't take it as a joke as much as a question to be answered. Kitty'd expected him to. "Perhaps they were not worthy?" he said. "Perhaps they hadn't learned their lesson."
"Good point. Makes you think," Kitty said, still looking around and feeling like she was on to something here. "Y'see, once people arrive, no one outside this valley will ever know what happened to them. Now, that can be a good thing. God knows mutants could use a sanctuary. But that wasn't the purpose here, was it? Not at the beginning."
And there it was, right on one of the desks. The little piece of information she'd been looking for, even if she wasn't entirely sure why she'd been looking for it yet. She was just going with it here. "Hey, you know whose name's been in the news lately? Aaron Pankow. He was this mass murderer who went after mutants. They just executed him," Kitty continued, stepping away from the desk and back towards Paul to show the nameplate she'd just found, which read- of course- Aaron Pankow, with Director of Strategic Analysis under his name. "What happened, Paul, somebody object to staying? Or maybe object to what was being done?"
"I... I don't know what you mean."
"That's a damned lie, and you, sir, are a damnable liar!" boomed a third voice as Stryker came out of stealth mode. Kitty hated that suit, she really did. "Come with me, girl," Stryker said, looking at her. "There's something you have to see."
Kitty had no reason to trust either one of them at this point, but she wanted answers, so she and Paul followed Stryker down another four levels. "Haven't you wondered about the townspeople, girl?" Stryker asked. "Kids galore, and all of them mutants. No adults, no human beings. Where'd they go?"
And the floor of this level was covered in bodies. It wasn't just a few laying here and there, like they could have been workers who might have just been trapped in here when there was some kind of accident. No, you could hardly see the floor here. She could have blamed the others on some terrible accident, but this made it look like people had been kept here on purpose, and trapped here, and murdered.
"Now we know," Stryker said.
"Paul, what happened here?" Kitty asked quietly, even though she had a sneaking suspicion she knew.
"Smart girl like you, isn't it obvious?" Stryker bit out.
"Like you have a right to talk," Kitty snapped. That 'no human beings' comment had struck a nerve. "You tried to turn the whole world into a boneyard like this! Or do the bodies not matter when they're mutants?"
"Look around, Pryde. Face my reality. My race is fighting for its very survival. What else do you expect?"
"It's my race, too!"
"Kitty, why are you arguing with it?" Paul asked, sounding confused.
And now she was confused, too. "I beg your pardon? Paul, he's not an it, he's a man. As twisted and misguided as they come, maybe, but a human being regardless."
"How can that be? Humans possess souls. Monsters have none."
Okay. She was past confusion and fully into that horrified feeling you got when you realized something had just gone totally off the rails. "What are you talking about?"
"There's a light inside you," Paul explained. "Inside all my people in Mt. Haven, like the stars in the heavens. In some, it's very bright. Yours is... strange. The radiance is very special, but sometimes it's hard to perceive, almost as if it's playing hide-and-seek. The Stryker creature has no light."
"Paul, all that means is that they're not mutants," Kitty explained.
"What are mutants?"
Oh, what was happening here. "People like me," she answered slowly, "people like the kids in town, people like you... don't you know?"
"Of course he knows," Stryker said, getting up from where he'd been kneeling on the landing by the bodies. Genuflecting might have been a better word for it, under the circumstances. "My God, girl, are you totally blind? Who do you think is responsible? Everyone who lived here, everyone who's come here since, everyone who isn't a mutant. He's killed them all." And with that, he handed Kitty the child's toy bear he'd found with the bodies.
Oh, God. She didn't know what Paul's deal was, but she really didn't want to believe she'd spent her day with a mass murderer. "Paul?"
"Kitty, are we not charged to defend the righteous against the ungodly?" Paul asked, completely calm.
For the life of her, Kitty did not understand why people kept using that argument to kill anyone who disagreed with them. Yes, please cite the Bible and then go ahead and disobey the fifth commandment because you were convinced you were in the right, sure. "But they were innocent!"
"They are monsters," Paul insisted. "They have no place in the Lord's creation."
"I couldn't have said so myself," Stryker said, taking advantage of Kitty's distracted state and grabbing her from behind to touch the collar around her neck. To her shock, the same sort of silver metal suit that Stryker had been wearing enveloped her. And now she knew where she'd gotten the collar. "He's been keeping his distance from you since you first met," he told her. "The poor monster seems morally afraid of you. Let's find out why, shall we?"
He pushed her towards Paul so hard that she stumbled on a stair. Kitty's automatic reaction to that sort of thing was to phase, to avoid any obstacles for both her safety and that of anyone around her.
Which didn't work so well when the person you were trying to phase through was electronic, and you were a walking techbane. Instead of just shorting anything out, though, it brought a whole different kind of pain this time, right before she blacked out.
[NFB, NFI, OOC okay. From X-Treme X-Men #28 and 29. Seriously, stay awake for five minutes, please.]
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