Altered Visions: A Marvel Fan Fiction Project

"Go! Go!" A stern voice whispers just before two small children, both dark-haired girls, sprint across the open area between a mass of smoldering buildings. Yesterday, this open area was known as Brown and Doyle, and, though the latter half of the Doyle Street sign stood defiant to the destruction, it could hardly be recognized as the lazy intersection it had been the day prior. The children run to the buildings across Brown, using the crumbled and burnt buildings to hide.

Sporadic clouds of smoke rise from the rubble that might have once been a home. The thick cloud of pollution rises into the air, and the owner of the stern voice nods to the woman kneeling just in front of him. She hesitates before she makes her first move, stopping again to turn back and almost speak to her husband. He dares not speak a word. Instead, he only points toward their hiding

A new plume rises, and the nearly obese woman rushes into the former intersection. Her slow pace is a gut wrenching to watch, knowing what may come if she doesn't make it across. The large woman nearly falls several times, dodging the massive debris littered all over the street, making it only halfway through her run. She reaches a clear area of pavement, finally able to pick up speed in her run; her face smacks into something solid and invisible. Her legs fold, and she collapses to the ground.

The man is frozen, cowering behind the ruins of brick and the dust of decimated sheetrock. His heart races at the sight of her, the radiant red-haired woman descending upon his wife, her face hidden in a cloak of flame. Her feet are covered in an almost shining gold fabric, and her identically covered glove lightly grips the fallen woman's face. Her hidden face turns toward his hiding place; if anything, he could swear to see the smile of a fiery reaper.

"He hides behind a wall," she says with intent for the man to hear it. "Your life is in danger; why does he hide? He is supposed to be your protector, and yet why does he hide?"

The golden fingers release the sobbing woman's face. Allowing her heavy body to fall, unsupported, to the debris below. The woman glances upward to the figure above her, wearing gold and red with fire dancing lightly over small parts of her body. She knew her once; in passing at least, everyone in this town knew one another. But, this is not the Jean Summers she once thought was 'pretty nice.' "He's weighing his options," 'Jean' speaks with a voice light of emotion, rather filled with a stain of enjoyment. "He worries more of his children than he does for you or himself.isn't that noble?"

"No, wait." Her voice trails away as she picks up a stray thought from the woman sobbing below. Jean's face peers down, turning to a quizzical expression. "So much for the perfect family." Fire flows our of her eyes as if her body were hollow; Jean stares down to the woman, annoyed with her sobbing. "All these years and you never told him?"

The man's wife is unable to turn away, and more tears form from her shameful secret. "Laughable human." The crimson-clad Jean raises the woman from the ground without more than a thought. Her closed fist tightens the grip around the woman as an invisible force envelopes her prey. "Why do you expect anything?" Jean's voice returns to the cold, uncaring question of the victim. "You want him to save you, and yet he doesn't even know the children aren't his own?"

Suspended in the air, the obese woman groans as her joints begin to crack as the force tightens around her. She screams, drowning out the snapping of two bones in her left leg. Blood soaks her clothing as the compound fractures worsen the injury. "You wish to call me a horror, and yet you hardly have the decency to judge."

The small children can no longer retain their silence. Small voices scream, revealing their place of hiding. A moot point to a telepathic mutant, Jean's head turns to the sound of the terrified youngsters. "Do you hear that? I wonder if they scream because they know their mother is a whore, or if they think they are going to die."

Jean smiles, and her head turns to the opposite direction; the man emerges from his hiding place with a large revolver in hand. A single shot fires, the projectile flies past Jean, and she laughs at the gesture.

Her open hand extends outward, an identical force enclosing the man and his pitiful toy. Making another small gesture of her hand, the man begins to move closer to Jean; his toes scrape along the ground, digging into the debris as Jean pulls him closer. "Your wife is a despicable liar, and you are a failure. You suspect your wife to be unfaithful, yet you lack the courage to confront her, and you allow it to continue."

The husband tries to speak, but Jean forces his mouth to close before words can form. "There is no point for you to continue your worthless existence," her suggestion is hypnotic, and the man raises his revolver upward under his own power.

An unnatural, continuous thunder rolls across the horizon. Shaking the earth, a large aircraft delicately balances on the scorching air it forces downward. It descends slowly in an almost impossible vertical touchdown for its size, and the airframe comes to rest on what was once a residential street.

Two ramps fall from the black aircraft; even as the engines have yet to wind down, a small contingency of uniformed men and women spill from their seats inside the aircraft. None of the six passengers say a single word, shout a single command, or stand curious of their surroundings. Each has their role to play, and no one thinks lightly of their situation.

A purple explosion disturbs the cool air with a whisper. Two bodies appear and disappear in an instant. Three more clouds burst through the air, and a final whispered implosion sets the sparsely seen bodies into the ruined home of Scott and Jean Summers.

Two women are quickly deposited close to the unconscious man sprawled onto the floor. Not a moment wasted, the doctor of the group dumps the contents of her large backpack on the floor. Immediately, she sets the man's arm and beings to dress the numerous lacerations about his upper body.

"He's taken a pretty good beating," Cecilia Reyes speaks up to her otherwise silent traveling partner. "He'll survive, but are you sure she did this?"

The other woman peers to the outside, surveying the perimeter formed around the crumbling house. "She is not the person you knew," her voice is as cold as the air around her. Ororo Monroe keeps her vigil on the day lit sky. "This is not Jean we will be dealing with, she is going to be driven by emotion, and, if it is the kind of emotion I think that is, it made her do all of this.goddess help us."

"If this is so bad, where is our back up?" The doctor mumbles through the medical tape hanging from her lip, "you don't think the seven of us will stand a chance against another Onslaught, do you?"

From the doorway, Storm can see the smoke rising from the town ahead. Alex had told her of the destruction their satellite imaging had picked up, the countless lives that had been lost since Scott's phone call for help could not be helped now, and the monster inside Jean Grey had been set free. "Cecilia, if we fail, rest assured the Avengers will know of it. Emma and her X-Factor will know. And, surely S.H.I.E.L.D. and Fury are already quite aware of what has already happened."

"None of them will be able to help us." A weak voice labors to be heard, and Cecilia rushes to place his ruby glasses back onto his face.

Scott Summers grimaces through the pain of his broken arm, making no attempt to hide the pain he tries to sit up and fails. The doctor and Storm help him up, using the overturned couch for a support against his back. "I.I'm sorry Ororo. I thought I could handle this." Says the first X-Man, "Jean is.too far gone. She severed our rapport the day the baby died; I'm not even in her head."

Storm's words startle herself. She does her best to hide her shaking hands from the other two in her presence; neither makes any mention of her trouble. The doctor makes haste to dress the reopening wounds over Scott's shirtless torso. "There's no telling how much damage she's done to you, Summers; we need to get you back to the mansion."

"No." The stalwart man interrupts. Fighting against the morphine coursing through his veins, he tries to stand, failing before he can really begin. "We stop this rampage here, now. Tend to the survivors, and then we'll worry about me."

"Iceman and Kitty are on point patrol," the garbled voice begins. "Nightcrawler is perched in the high ground. Our eyes are peeled. I'm dug in, ready to blast anything that moves."

The radio signal dies, leaving the two women with their attention the wounded Cyclops. "Where are Charles and Warren?" he asks of his rescuers, his swollen eyes unable to read their faces even beyond the limitation of the red dominated vision.

"Warren couldn't be reached." Even she has trouble saying the words; Storm silently wishes to herself if she could have waited. "He was attending to a stock holders meeting, and his secretary refused to interrupt. I'm sorry Scott; we had to come without him."

The redheaded woman pushes past the overfilled wastebasket and puts herself in the line of sight with Xavier. Standing across his table, she tries to ignore the scores of maps and dry erase markers; she looks down to him. "They're here."

She half expects to see some sort of elation in his face, at least a smile to see his plans come to fruition; however, she sees neither. "Very good," Xavier's voice is monotone, no hint of feeling one way or another, and it is the first time she has noticed the dark circles under his eyes. "Let us begin, then."

Side by side, the pair walks into the second cottage on the rented property, not but a few paces from the temporary home Xavier had acquired some weeks ago. There isn't a face in the room that she doesn't already recognize. Still, she is mildly curious why Charles wanted her to go out of her way to save this Rolling Thunder woman from her own stupidity months before.

Amelia walks to the middle of the room, just between the groups of impatient onlookers. "Charles, I'm sure an introduction to these people would be a moot point," she says with a smirk. "The majority of your list accepted the invitation; however, there were a few that managed to say a few nasty expletives before turning me down to help you."

"So it seems," a gray-haired man speaks in order to interrupt, spinning a highly polished helmet about his middle finger.

Xavier's ice-blue eyes quickly shift to the right side of the room, his head soon to follow. "Good morning, Mister Petros, I see your reluctant comrade refuses to join us."

"Rankin asked me to tell you no in person, but I'll keep it friendly and leave out the rest of his speech." The man called Avalanche to most calms the movement of his headpiece and sets it on the table he sits behind. "You just can't buy some people, Xavier."

"Heh, I've got less morals than you'd think. But, I'm no cheap date."

His head moves back and forth with disapproval in his eyes. "Ladies, gentleman, I have asked you all to come here because our dream is close at hand. We mutants have a community where we live and flourish, yet we do so in isolation of humans. There is a matter of great importance that I feel will require the use of your individual talents to achieve our dream in full. Moreover, there is the matter of your questionable moral standings.

"Yeah, I have a dream," a sarcastic voice picks up from behind the crowd. No one pays much attention to the dark haired man leaning back in his chair with his feet propped atop a table. "One day, we'll all get paid, we'll go on our merry way, and you do whatever it is you need to."

""Thank you, Jared," Charles Xavier's says behind a scowl. "That was wonderfully pointless. Shall we continue?"

The brown haired man closes his mouth, and Xavier looks away from the former Canadian operative. "What I aim to accomplish with your help requires me to step outside my normal dealings as this is not something any group with a sustained standing in any community will be able to survive; if we do not complete this endeavor, we all shall surely be punished to the full extent of international law, and, when I say this, I mean to suggest that, if you want no part in this plan, you should leave now before I divulge anything."

A strong silence falls over the room. Several of the attendants look to one another, saying not a word; one in particular stares ahead. His eyes never leave the man that many would compare to a saint, his arms crossed over his chest. "Maybe you should just get to the point," James Proudstar speaks from a back corner, leaning against the wall. His scowl hasn't had a chance to relax since Xavier entered the room. "We're all here, we all signed up for our reasons, and we trust your money more than your words, regardless."

"Tell the man."

"Shut your mouth, Corbo," Proudstar interrupts, "Just get on with the plan, Xavier."

A cylinder of paper slides from its pouch behind Xavier's wheelchair. As quiet as the rest of the room, Amelia unrolls the map over the long table with two women sitting on the opposite side. "This job has become much easier, thanks in part to the great recon work done by Scanner. As some of you may not know, you're looking at the security layout for the Parliament Building for the Government of Genosha."

"Xavier," Petros' voice trails into the air. "You can't be serious."

Without a shred of emotion on his face, Xavier raises his head to the six mutants standing and sitting in front of Amelia Voght. "Ladies and gentleman, we are here to claim the government of Genosha and remake it as a shining example for the rest of the world to emulate."

It should be snowing, but a soft rain falls from the sky instead. Something of a fine mist a person would expect to find on a humid day after a heavy rain. In this temperature, none of the sort is normal. Twenty-two degrees is the Iceman's first guess of the air, perhaps a wind chill of seventeen.

Every rational thought inside the mind of a man who intimately knows what the cold can do tells him how wrong these sights are. The chill of the wind passes over his flesh-sixteen degrees his mind says-and he stops in the center of standing water.

The puddle is ankle deep and without the slightest sound of cracking ice. "This is just weird."

The brunette a few paces ahead turns to inquire, but only her visible breath escapes her mouth. Shivering in the wind, her generic uniform does little to protect her. Katherine Pryde looks to her appointed sitter and wonders to herself, 'why did I agree to do this?'

"Nothing to say, Kitty Cat?" asks the Iceman as he makes his way through the unnatural marshland.

Her eyes are everywhere but on him. "I'm fresh out of ideas. Thanks for your concern."

"Don't thank me," he stammers his speech when his foot slides through mud. He throws his leg forward, tossing a small ball of mud into the air, catching himself from falling face first into the chilled mud. "Your well-being isn't on my mind as much as my own at the moment."

"Your honesty has always been your most enduring aspect." Her lip curls. "Such a charmer."

"I do what I can, Kitty Cat." He smiles. "Keeping walking, will ya? We still have another half mile to cover."

The young woman turns to face forward, renewing the course. Stepping their way through the soaked mud, they traverse ahead. Wordless as the scent of charred wood consumes their nostrils, the pair is spellbound as the horizon clears atop a hill.

Smoke rises thick into the sky. Flames dance their orange and yellow terror, and, instantly, the two patrollers stop. "Havok," Iceman speaks into the microphone fed along the left side of his face. "This is worse than we thought."

His mouth is dry as are his eyes. Glaring at the carnage ahead, he doesn't give thought to the garbled speech returning to his ear.

"We need to go," Kitty says without hesitation. "We need to go now."

The air turns cooler at the silent command of the Iceman. His hair frosting as flesh changes with the cracking coat of his namesake. Seconds pass before the familiar human face becomes a sculpture of his likeness.

A plume rises, and a scream is carried by the wind. Frozen as he is, the Iceman feels a sickness in his stomach. "Let's go, Kitty. Strength is in numbers today."

"Hardly." She steps backward onto a rising platform of ice, a new, terrifying sight filling her eyes. ;

Smoke had once filled the sky with its blackness, a dark coating only tar could relate. Red. Yellow. Orange. Three colors kill the blackness--destroy it with more anger, fear, and power than she had ever known.

Kitty Pryde no longer feels the cold, even though every strand of her brunette hair shoots straight backward. Fire rises into the sky, the shape far more familiar than any of the X-Men would care to admit. The only care in her world now taking a selfish turn.

"God help us," she whispers into the wind, following her words with a silent prayer she only hopes is heard by any deity that might or might not exist.

Gigantic. A failing word, but the only one she can manage. The horizon itself is eaten alive by the unfurling wings of a massive bird, consumed by the fires which spawn it. "The sun must be jealous."

He takes one look over his should at the end of Kitty's sentence, and the Iceman shivers. "Hold on tight; its time to exercise an effort of desperation."

Rings of freezing air encircle both wrists and become solid. His body all but folds into the frozen platform he shares with Kitty. The surface thins itself, picking up speed. All the old tricks are tossed away, and the Iceman becomes his creation. Growing at an alarming speed, the frozen frame makes its haste from the flame that devours the sky.