“Here’s where you’re going to be staying for the foreseeable future,” Mystique told her subordinates as she pulled up the stolen tour bus to a rotting old barnhouse surrounded by overgrown farmland, several miles outside Bayville’s city limits.

     “THAT’S where we’re living?” Lance said. “You’ve gotta be kidding me! It barely even has a roof!”

     “First off, if I hear you complain again I’ll make sure you have a nice, cozy jail cell for a room instead, seeing as how you were the one who WRECKED my previous house,” Mystique threatened as she stepped out of the tour bus and into the field, the snow on the tall weeds brushing off and dampening everyone’s clothes as they followed her.

     “Aw, great, more cold water… just when I was starting to get dry…” a shivering Toad mumbled, right before sneezing out a stream of slimy snot onto the ground.

     “And secondly,” Mystique continued as they entered the barn’s rotting husk of an interior, “You give me far too little credit.”

     Moving towards the only part of the barn that didn’t look like it was going to cave in any second, Mystique carefully pushed aside an old crate—revealing, to everyone else’s surprise, a staircase that descended down below ground level about a dozen feet and stopped in front of a heavy metal door.

     As the others caught up with her, astounded, Mystique walked down the stairs and pressed her palm into the appropriate indentation in the front of the door. After a few seconds, a computerized voice responded with a “Welcome,” and the door slid open. Mystique motioned like she was going to step through the door, but then suddenly stopped and turned around.

     “Blob, before you follow us into our new headquarters, I need you to go back out and dispose of the tour bus. The authorities are no doubt looking for us, and a bus sitting out in the middle of nowhere will attract unwanted attention.”

     “Uh… dispose of it?” Blob asked, scratching his head. “Where? You want me to drive it down to a junkyard or something?”

     “No, you imbecile!” Mystique snarled. “Use your imagination, for once! Smash it into a ditch somewhere, crush it down and use it as a paperweight, shove it into your mouth like everything else you come across! Just get rid of it!”

     “Huh, it WOULD be cool to have a bus paperweight…” Blob said to himself as he walked back towards the bus while the others went inside of the new Brotherhood headquarters.

     “I don’t suppose I need to bother asking where you got the money for all this?” Lance asked.

     “No, you don’t,” Mystique said.

     “Man, this is place is something else,” Noriko said, still looking around as she plopped down on a sofa next to Lance and Fred, who was fiddling with his new crushed-bus paperweight, which was only about a foot wide.

     “Heh, yeah, especially compared to our old dump,” Fred said, his eyes never leaving his new cube-shaped plaything.

     Lance, still steamed at Mystique’s treatment of him earlier, had to admit that Fred was right—although their new place wasn’t quite at the level of the X-Men’s facilities, it was far, far better than their old house. For one thing, the thing was incredibly well-kept—Mystique must have hired a maid or something to stop by every now and then to keep the place clean, with extra pay to keep their mouth shut, of course. Then there were the actual rooms—Mystique had clearly thought of everything. There was a workout room, a training room complete with dummy X-Men, individual rooms for each of the members (and a few more rooms to spare, in case of more new recruits), a well-stocked kitchen, a neat dining room—the works. The only thing Lance didn’t like about it was that there was only one small TV—clearly Mystique didn’t care too much about what they did during their off-time. Well, that and the fact that the place had no personality to it whatsoever—almost everything was colored a drab gray.

     “Old dump?” Noriko asked, “What happened to it?”

     “Long story short, we were attacked by a bunch of jerks using some special Mutant-killing formula, and in the process our house collapsed,” Lance explained.

     “Because of you,” Fred said off-handedly.

     “Yeah, because of me,” Lance growled, elbowing Fred in the stomach. Naturally, Fred didn’t even flinch.

     “Doesn’t sound like you miss it much anyway,” Noriko said, taking off her gauntlets and placing them on the table in front of her.

     “Woah! Hey!” Lance said. “Isn’t that dangerous?”

     “Not if I put them back on within a few hours,” Noriko said, flexing her wrist. “Now and then I just need to get the darned things off—they’re so bulky and they cramp up my hands after a while.”

     “So how’d you get those things, then?” Fred asked. “Who made ‘em for you?”

     “Mystique,” Noriko answered. “Well, not Mystique, one of her ‘contacts,’ I guess. I don’t know exactly who, she just showed up one day and—well, I guess I better start earlier than that, otherwise that part wouldn’t make any sense.”

     “Go ahead, I’m not going anywhere,” Lance said, leaning back into the couch. “It’s nice to actually be able to sit on something comfortable for the first time in a few months.”

     “Anyways, when my powers manifested about a year ago, I didn’t realize it for several hours afterwards,” Noriko started. “You see, the way my powers normally work is that I slowly take in static electricity from my surroundings. Depending on the environment, it takes me anywhere from a few hours to half a day to build up a full charge. My gauntlets help to store that excess energy and let me fire it off whenever I want to. Before I had them, well… I would discharge all that extra electricity all at once. Explosively.”

     “So then, the first time you discharged your energy…” Lance started.

     “It wasn’t a pretty picture,” Noriko said, lowering her gaze to the floor. “I blew up my house, and my parents with it.”

     “Aw, man… I’m sorry,” Fred said.

     “Don’t worry about it,” Noriko said, lifting her gaze back up to meet Fred and Lance’s, “My parents were ultra-strict, know-it-all jerks, anyways.” Her tone, however, betrayed her real feelings on the subject.

     “So after that happened, I panicked and ran away,” Noriko continued, “since I knew the police would be after me for murdering my own parents. I knew they wouldn’t believe that it was an accident, so I high-tailed it to the nearest unpopulated area I could find. Thing is, every couple of hours I would discharge all of that electricity again, and I hadn’t learned how to channel it into extra speed yet, so it made me VERY easy to trail. Within a week they had found me, and locked me up in a maximum-security prison. After I blew apart the first cell I was put in, they kept me out in the jailyard, several guns pointed at me constantly, for a few days while they quickly lined a cell with some kind of material that could absorb and ground electricity. I was forced to live in there for about nine months, until Mystique showed up, having worked her way into the prison that she seems so apt at doing. She promised me a way to control my powers, in return for my allegiance to her cause. Heck, even if she didn’t offer me these gauntlets, I probably still would’ve taken her up on her offer. She makes the most sense of any adult I’ve listened to in a long time. Screw the humans, always pushing us around when we’re the ones with powers.”

     “Amen to that,” Lance said, and Fred nodded as well.

     “Attention everyone,” Mystique’s voice said via the speakers located throughout the base, “Meet me in the front room in five minutes, and DON’T doddle! It’s time to reveal to you what we’re going to do next.”

     “Aw, we have a comlink system, too! That’s so cool!” Fred exclaimed.

     “Good thing we’re already IN the front room,” Lance said. “That way I don’t have to get up from this couch.”

     “So, what’s the plan?” Noriko asked.

     “I hope it doesn’t involve running around a lot… is it chilly in here or is it just me?” Todd moaned, shivering, his face a little paler than normal.

     “In short, we’re going to attack the X-Men,” Mystique said, crossing her arms and smiling.

     “Awww…” Toad said, burying his face in his hands. “That’s not what I wanted to hear.”

     “Uh, I think you’re getting a bit TOO caught up in this whole ‘New Brotherhood’ thing,” Lance protested. “I mean, yeah, we got a new base and two new teammates, but there’s still no way we can take down all the X-Men! There’s too many of ‘em!”

     “Normally, I would agree with you,” Mystique admitted, “But I want to show dear Charles that we’re—or, rather, YOU’RE-- no longer a bunch of misfits that they can just swat away. You forget that Christmas is just a week away, Avalanche. In just three more days, the vast majority of the X-Men will be leaving the Mansion to go home and spend the week with their families. We’re going to make sure that never happens.” “Oh, this is gonna be good, mates,” John chuckled, rubbing his hands together.

     “Quite simply, this is how I’ve discovered the X-Men are divided come Christmas Break—Cyclops, Rogue, Beast, and Xavier stay at the X-Mansion. Wolverine drives off by himself. We don’t need to worry about them. The rest of the X-Men squeeze themselves into the X-Van and two other cars, then drive off in different directions to either drive their occupants home if they live nearby or drop them off at the airport or train station. We’ll wait long enough for the cars to be far enough away from each other—ten minutes after they leave the Mansion should be enough—then we’ll attack the car heading towards the airport and try to take out as many of the X-Men as we can. We’ll be too far away from the others for any other reinforcements to arrive before we’re finished. If you all actually follow my orders this time, we should be able to either capture or eliminate enough of the X-Men to send Xavier a VERY powerful message.”

     “I like it,” Noriko smirked.

     “Told ya it was gonna be good,” John laughed.

     “It still seems like a long shot,” Lance admitted.

     “It won’t in three days,” Mystique said, getting right in Lance’s face, “Because the next three days all of you will be training harder than you’ve ever trained in your life. You WILL be ready for this.”

     Todd started to moan loudly, but was interrupted by an oncoming sneeze.

     “Man, I hate this part of the year,” Rogue grumbled as she waved good-bye to the departing X-Men from the front steps of the X-Mansion.

     “Aw, c’mon, it’s Christmas,” Scott said, nudging Rogue good-naturedly. “It’s supposed to be one of the best times of the year.”

     “Yeah, but it’s so boring around here with everyone else gone,” Rogue said as they turned around and walked behind Hank and Xavier through the Mansion’s front doors. “I mean, we got lucky last year since we were able to go to New York to look for Angel and all, but that ain’t gonna happen every year.”

     “Hey, at least we don’t have to deal with Bobby for a whole week,” Scott grinned.

     “That’s true,” Rogue smiled.

     Mystique watched carefully through her binoculars while Scott, Rogue, Hank, and Xavier all went inside the X-Mansion as the three cars exited the Mansion grounds and went off in different directions. Satisfied, she lowered her binoculars, took a quick look around the water tower to make sure no one else had discovered her presence up here, then opened her comlink channel and spoke into it.

     “Alright, they’re leaving. Our target vehicle is Xavier’s limousine, heading north along 52nd Street. The X-Men that entered the vehicle before it left were Magma, Wolfsbane, Mercury—“

     “Wait, who’s Mercury?” Blob’s voice came back over the comlink, interrupting her.

     “Did you LISTEN at all when I mentioned the changes with the X-Men recently!?” Mystique growled. “She’s the silver-skinned girl. Just… stay away from her, Blob, your powers are useless against her. Anyways, getting BACK to what I was saying before, the Mutants in the vehicle are Magma, Wolfsbane, Mercury, Jubilee, Sunspot, and Nightcrawler, and Colossus is driving. We’re outnumbered, but only slightly. Surge, follow it, and make SURE you keep out of sight. And only just keep it within your sights—make sure not to use up all of your charge before the actual fight. Notify us when they turn onto Kirkland Street.”

     “Gotcha,” came Noriko’s voice over the comlink. “Following now.”

     Satisfied, Mystique turned off her comlink, morphed into a hawk, and flew off the roof in the general direction of the limousine.

     Toad nearly jumped as the comlink went off.

     “The car’s turning onto Kirkland now, guys,” Noriko said over the comlink. “I’m heading back to my position. Get ready.”

     “Ugh. We gotta do this now?” whined Toad. “It’s gotta be below zero out here. And I feel like I gotta puke. Let ‘em have Christmas, we’ll just get ‘em on Secretary’s Day or somethin’. Oh, I’m sorry, Administrative Professionals Day.”

     “Shut up already and deal with it, or I’ll make sure you feel a lot worse in a few minutes,” the Scarlet Witch growled, standing up and looking over the edge of the rooftop they were on to see the limo make its way down the street towards them. “Here they come. Lance, are you ready?”

     Avalanche nodded and flexed his fingers, then got to work on the street directly in front of them.

     Piotr yelled for everyone to hold on as a crevasse suddenly opened up in the Earth’s crust about a dozen yards ahead of them. All the other cars nearby swerved towards the sides of the road, the unluckier ones crashing into the sides of buildings or fire hydrants.

     “Avalanche!” Kurt said in quick realization as Piotr slammed on the brakes and swerved his steering wheel right, towards an empty parking lot off of the side of the road. To everyone’s surprise, however, the car didn’t brake or swerve, but kept on going right towards the crevasse.

     “W-what d-do we d-do?!” Cessily said hurriedly, panicking.

     “Kurt, port us, now!” Piotr yelled.

     “Got it!” Kurt said, grabbing the dashboard with both hands and concentrating. They suddenly appeared in the empty parking lot, though they were still going at their normal speed.

     “That must have been Wanda—that means that the whole Brotherhood must be here,” Piotr said to everyone else as he opened up the car door on his side. “Everyone, open up your doors! Get ready to jump out!”

     “Hey, let me help!” came a familiar voice from directly in front of them. Looking forward, the X-Men all saw Blob standing a short distance in front of the car, a grin on his face. For the car occupants, it went without saying that the Brotherhood had expected them to teleport the car here, and were waiting for them.

     However, instead of just standing there and letting the car slam directly into him, Blob instead stepped to one side and waited the half-second it took for the car to go by him. Right after the front half the limo passed him, Blob punched his hand through the side of the limo with a grunt. As the limo suddenly came to a screeching halt, Rahne, who was seated on the side of the limo Blob had punched his hand through, lurched forward from the sudden stop and slammed her head right into Blob’s fist. Her nose smashed and bleeding heavily, Rahne slipped back into her seat, slumped and unconscious.

     “Rahne!” Amara yelled.

     “That is IT!” Piotr growled, and changed into his steel form, busting through his seat belt and getting ready to leap out of the side of the limo. “You will not harm any more of Xavier’s students, Blob! I will see to it personally!”

     “C’mon, we’ve already seen you aren’t as strong as me!” Blob said, lifting up the limo with the one hand he had punched through it. “And you won’t be seeing anything but black in a second! Hey, that was a pretty good line, I’m gonna have to remember that one…”

     Reaching back, Blob hurled the limo towards a building on the other side of the road.

     “Kurt, again!” Piotr yelled.

     Kurt nodded and gripped the dashboard again, porting the car a couple dozen yards back, where they slammed into Blob’s backside.

     “Woah… didn’t think of that…” Blob admitted, grunting from the unexpected impact.

     “X-Men, engage the enemy!” Colossus commanded as the limo occupants recovered from the impact and piled out of the vehicle, minus Rahne and Cessily. At the same time, most of the other Brotherhood members all emerged from various spots around the block where they had been hiding.

     “I’ll s-stay to help pr-protect Rahne,” Cessily said, stretching her arm around the side of the limo and into the trunk and pulling out a first aid kit.

     “You have gone too far this time, Blob!” Colossus yelled at Blob, who was cleaning the glass from the limo’s crushed headlights off of his pants.

     “The problem is, he hasn’t gone far enough,” Surge said, zooming up from the other side of the street in a split second and firing off a burst of electrical charge. Completely caught by surprise, Colossus took it directly in the chest and went down onto one knee, grunting from a smoking crater that had appeared there from the blast.

     “Who… are you?” Colossus asked.

     “Name’s Surge, don’t forget it,” the blue-haired Mutant grinned. “Which shouldn’t be too hard, seeing as how your life is going to end in a few minutes.”

     Charging up her gauntlets for another, larger blast, Surge didn’t see Nightcrawler port directly behind her, grab her, and port again.

     Blob wrenched himself free from the car bumper that had partially curved around his midsection and stomped towards Colossus, grinning.

     “Oh no you don’t!” Jubilee yelled, running up and positioning herself between Colossus and Blob. Before Blob could react, Jubilee unleashed a stream of her “fireworks” right into Blob’s eyes. Grunting in pain, his eyes watering, Blob stumbled backwards, his hands covering his face.

     “Got him!” Jubilee said, but no sooner had she finished the sentence than a loud rumble started under the ground. It quickly grew louder, and the parking lot under Jubilee and Colossus started to roll up and down in miniature waves. Colossus, easily being the heavier of the two, was able to keep his balance fairly well, but Jubilee landed flat on her rear and was unable to gain enough balance to enable her to stand up again. Avalanche unleashed another wave of force from his position on the other side of the parking lot, this time aimed at a lone tree planted near the sidewalk about a dozen feet from where Jubilee and Colossus were. His wave hit the tree at just the right angle, and it toppled over onto a screaming Jubilee. The tree wasn’t nearly hefty enough to crush her to death, but the force of the blow clearly harmed her, as a trickle of blood started to run down from her forehead.

     “Piotr---help me!” Jubilee grunted.

     “I’m coming!” Colossus said, slowly making his wave through the now-unstable parking lot towards the trapped X-Man. Grunting, Colossus picked up the broken tree, freeing Jubilee from under it, and hefted it at Avalanche. The Brotherhood member leapt out of the way just before the tree collided with him, however, and escaped harm.

     “Vhy are you doing zis?” Kurt asked as Surge broke free from his grip, the blue-haired girl clearly frustrated. Kurt had teleported them both onto the top of a building a block away. “Ze Brotherhood is bad news!”

     “You’re quick, Mutie, but not quick enough,” Surge said, ignoring the question as she turned around in the blink of an eye and fired off a blast of electricity. Kurt just barely managed to teleport out of the way in time, to another spot on the roof.

     “Apparently I am,” Kurt grinned, shrugging his shoulders.

     Cursing, Surge fired off another huge blast, but Kurt teleported out of the way again, this time back into the parking lot below.

     Searching around for a few moments, Surge mumbled something unintelligible and was just about to run down the building’s staircase and back into the battle when Kurt suddenly ported right behind her, this time a fully charged Sunspot with him.

     “Surprise,” Sunspot grinned, and decked Surge before she could react.

     Meanwhile, on the parking lot below, Pyro was laughing manically as he slowly crept towards the X-Men protecting the limo and its two remaining occupants, a twenty-foot-high wall of flame keeping them from trying to attack him in retaliation.

     “I’m the only one who can stop him—and  the wall-- before he gets so close to the limo that the vehicle explodes,” Magma said, flaring up into her flame form. “I’m immune to his fire, so I’m going in.”

     Magma gritted her teeth and ran into the flame wall.

     As soon as she plunged into the flames, Pyro yelled out, “Now!”

     Wanda came out from behind a thick tree a few yards to the left of Pyro and sent out a hexing bolt towards Magma. Suddenly, Magma screeched in pain and ran out of the wall of flames, on fire but this time actually being burned by the flames, since her powers were currently being nulled by Wanda’s powers.

     Kurt and Sunspot ported back down to the parking lot after taking care of Noriko and Kurt quickly directed Sunspot over to a nearby fire hydrant. Sunspot slammed his fist down onto the fire hydrant and a strong spray of water streamed in Magma’s general direction. It doused the flames, but Magma collapsed to the ground, her clothes half-burnt and her skin covered in third-degree burns.

     While Wanda and Pyro were distracted by what Sunspot and Magma were doing, Kurt quickly ported over Colossus behind Wanda, who in turn smashed his fist into another fire hydrant and directed the high-pressure spray towards Wanda and Pyro, who were both caught by surprise and took it directly in the face. This distracted them long enough for Colossus to run over and smash their heads together with a roar of fury, rendering the two Brotherhood members unconscious.

     Cessily, who was in the process of bandaging Rahne’s nose, involuntarily let out a short shriek as Toad suddenly dropped down onto the ground next to the limo.

     “Hey, look, I don’t want no trouble,” Toad said, raising his hands in a defensive posture. “But I need to look like I’m doing something, and I feel like crud with the pneumonia and all, so to make it easier on both of us could you just—“

     Toad was interrupted as Cessily stretched out her arm, socking Toad in the jaw with her fist.

     “Fank foo,” Toad mumbled, rubbing his swelling jaw, and collapsed to the ground a moment later.

     Mystique surveyed the chaos below, circling overhead in her hawk form. Things weren’t going quite as nicely as she had hoped, but certainly better than she had come to expect from her subordinates.

     Note to self: Focus on getting your students to work harder at paying attention to their surroundings, especially when they’re fighting Kurt, she thought, taking note of how Surge, Pyro, and the Scarlet Witch had been taken out of the picture. Toad had been knocked out by other means—big surprise there—but Lance was still fighting adamantly, even though he was outnumbered now, and Blob had rejoined the fray, having finally regained his eyesight.

     Looking towards the X-Mansion in the far-off distance, her keen hawk eyes made out the XM Velocity helijet taking off from the launch pad, and she already heard myriad police sirens that were growing louder by the second. If they were going to end this little demonstration, the time was now.

     She had wanted this little demo to end the life of at least one X-Man, but she supposed having four of them injured—three rather seriously—was enough for now, and would get the general message across to Xavier. Still, perhaps they could still take one as a hostage…

     Setting her sights on the severely burnt, unconscious form of Amara, Mystique tucked in her wings and dove towards the battle below.

     Closer… closer… Mystique thought as the wind whipped by her feathers and the parking lot took up more and more of her vision.

     Now! Mystique opened up her wings and flapped them as hard as she could, curving upwards and swooping over the battlefield just a few feet above the ground, causing Sunspot to roll to one side to get out of her way. Extending her talons, she gripped Amara firmly and flew upwards, over the top of a building on the other side of the street.

     “Amara!” Colossus yelled.

     Just as Mystique crested the top of the building however, she felt a sharp stabbing pain in her left wing as a flaming hot bone spike shot right through it. Screeching in pain, Mystique dropped Amara the five feet to the rooftop and morphed back into her normal form, clutching her shoulder.

     “Argh!” Mystique growled, glowering down at Spyke, who had just emerged from the sewers and was aiming another bone spike at her. Out of all the Mutants to best her, it had to be that Morlock freak! “Avalanche, Blob, gather up the others and get out of here! I’ll get Surge!”

     Avalanche let loose a large wave of force at the X-Men, keeping them off their feet long enough for the conscious Brotherhood members to gather up their teammates and leave the scene.

     “So much for a boring vacation, huh?” Cyclops asked, surveying the scene as he and Rogue helped Amara and Rahne onto the XM Velocity, which had landed in the middle of the parking lot.

     “If this was the only other option, I would’ve preferred boring instead,” Rogue said, a mix of anger and sadness in her voice as she and Scott went over to where the other X-Men were gathered, some of them talking to the authorities and others helping Colossus find the pieces that had been blown out of his chest—without them back in place, he couldn’t go back into his normal form again without bleeding to death. “I’ve never seen the Brotherhood cause this kind of trouble before—even when we first met Wanda, none of us actually really got hurt. But the Prof says Amara’s going to be hospitalized for at least three weeks, and Rahne and Jubilee, both with pretty bad concussions, aren’t much better off.”

     Looking among the throng of Mutants, Cyclops recognized a face he didn’t expect to find here.

     “Evan! What are you doing here?” he asked.

     “Are you kidding me?” Spyke said, walking up to Cyclops and Rogue. “You could hear this fight six blocks away! It wasn’t hard to find out where it was coming from—I figured you guys probably needed help.”

     “Well, thanks,” Cyclops said. “We appreciate it. Big time.”

     “No problem,” Spyke said, “I just got here near the end of the fight, anyway. Man, this block’s thoroughly trashed…. The roads are ruined, there’s busting pipelines everywhere, the parking lot looks even worse than Bayville High’s lot did after we had that fight there, back when I was still with you guys… Mystique really must’ve been pushing the Brotherhood hard to get them to do this much damage.”

     “She also added two new recruits to her team, from what Piotr has told us,” said Beast, walking over and joining in on the conversation. “Pyro has defected from the Acolytes and joined the Brotherhood, apparently, and they’ve also recruited a new Mutant with electrical attacks named Surge.”

     “Well, whatever new purpose Mystique had for getting the Brotherhood back together,” Rogue said, “It’s obvious that the days of them just being a minor annoyance are over. It looks like Mystique’s new Brotherhood means business.”

The End
 

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