THE DAY THE WORLD WENT AWAY

Part IV

By Chris Munn

It’s been said that perfection is an abstract impossibility, seen through the lens of the individual as to what they view they would like to become. This, in itself, is a conundrum. If perfection is unattainable, then why strive for it in the first place? Of course, one could also say that my ‘lens of the individual’ is flawed as well, for how could one look upon the concept of perfection as an abstract when they’ve been born with a mutation that makes the unattainable a walking, breathing reality?

Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful.

When everyone else is a rung below you on the ladder of evolutionary consciousness, you tend to become a bit frustrated. Fact facts, chum: I’m prettier than you, I’m strongerthan you, I’m smarter than you, and – in every sense of the concept – I am what you will never be. Conceit, to me, is the only logical way to view the people around me.

Monet St. Croix is not to be fucked with, sir.

So go ahead, call me a ‘bitch’…all you’re doing is proving my point for me.

She applied pressure, pressing the ball of her booted foot hard against the throat of the young man with whom she had been intimate with several hours before. A sinister grin was noticeable on the face of Monet St. Croix as she held Everett Thomas to the floor of the Amalgamation Chamber. She whistled while grinding her foot into his neck, causing him to making undecipherable choking noises.

“Please be careful with him, dear,” Adam said as he entered the room, his silken robe flowing leisurely behind him, “no need to harm the merchandise just yet.”

“Get on out of it, you mother fucker!” Jon Starsmore yelled from the far end of the room. Rubbing the back of his head, which had struck the steel vault door behind him after he’d been thrown by Monet, Jon found his energy suddenly depleted. He wanted to get up, to save his friend, but he just couldn’t muster the strength.

Adam laughed softly as he walked through the room, stepping widely over the incapacitated Everett. Making his way to Jon, the self-proclaimed messiah of Wonderland crouched down in front of the younger man. “Your energy chemistry makes you wonderfully easy to control,” the bearded mutant stated, “I imagine you’re feeling about as weak as a kitten right about now.”

“Monet, jaysis gel,” Jon yelled averting his eyes to the young Algerian woman that stood past the man crouching before him, “snap out of it. We’re yer mates!”

“She is mine, Jonothon Starsmore,” Adam said as he carefully sat down on the floor, crossing his legs Indian style, “and the two of you shall soon follow her into servitude. But I have a question, a pressing one that does not allow for the luxury of time it will take to break you.”

Jon scowled.

“Who sent you here, my child?” Adam asked. “Who is the Judas?”

Nathaniel Essex coughed slightly as the man on the slab slowly fluttered to consciousness. He was taking a risk – a large one – but he knew that there was no other choice. The children of Xavier had been apprehended during their assigned task, and it would only be a matter of time before Adam discovered the involvement of his chief geneticist. The bestial man that was just awakening was his last hope, and that fact alone made him uneasy.

“Please, Wolverine,” Essex said as he snapped his fingers in front of the awakening man’s face, “do show some fortitude. You’ve recovered from far worse far more quickly. Of course, you’ve never died before either, so maybe this is all part of the natural process?”

Suddenly, the man named Logan sat up with blinding speed, his claws bursting through his knuckles on a course for the scientist’s face. Essex refused to flinch as the points of the claws stopped at the exact point they hit his skin, applying pressure without cutting. “I know you,” Wolverine grunted, shaking his head and batting his eyes as conscious thought returned to him, “Sinister.”

“You have two options,” Essex spoke, his eyes narrowed and focused on the wild man that had him moments away from a violent death. “One: kill me and run wild, only to be slapped down by Adam once again. Two: listen to me as I explain what brought you here, and take up arms against our mad patriarch before he kills us both. Choose wisely.”

Wolverine furrowed his brow, claws still trained on the flesh of the man he’d only known as an enemy. After several long moments, the claws snapped back into place within Logan’s forearms, relieving the pressure from the doctor’s face. “You got thirty seconds, bub…use ’em wisely.”

“While I’m sure your memories are adequately scrambled,” Essex began, “you must take these words on faith. You are dead, Wolverine, killed in some unknown battle on Earth. Upon your death, you were transported to this limbo, a way station for deceased mutants that was created by a madman with the ability to manipulate the reality of this dimension. This man is named Adam, the one responsible for your previous bout of unconsciousness. Adam is obsessed with playing God when it comes to mutant destiny, going so far as to bring me – a non-mutant – here upon my own death to assist him. He destroys the energy matrices of the mutants he gathers, allowing only the ones he can adequately control to remain here as his staff.”

Wolverine shook his head, Essex’s words hitting him with the force of a moving vehicle.

“Welcome to Wonderland, X-Man,” Sinister said with a nod of his head, “I hope you’re ready to help me bring it to its knees…”

“Uh…sir?” Douglas Ramsey asked as he walked timidly into the Amalgamation Chamber, his eyes darting to and fro betwixt the two defeated teenage X-Men. “Sir, we have a problem.”

Adam sighed softly, closing his eyes with an extreme show of patience. “What is it, child?” he asked from his spot on the floor, still staring dead into the eyes of Jon Starsmore.

“We found a body,” Ramsey began as he moved cautiously behind Monet, careful not to touch her for fear of reprisal, “in the holding cells for runaways. We can’t positively identify it, but we think it’s Catseye.”

“I brought that poor, dim girl back from the abyss once, Douglas,” Adam answered, smiling at Jon as he spoke, “I can do it again.”

“That’s, um, that’s not all,” Cypher continued, his words prefaced by an audible gulping noise from his throat. “One of the runaways is missing.”

“What?” Adam yelled, jumping to his feet to address his underling. “We can’t have a runaway walking around loose in the facility! Which one is it, child…which one?”

“Rasputin,” was the only word that Ramsey had to say. Adam’s brow wrinkled as a scowl appeared on his bearded face.

{Ev…Ev, you hear me, mate?}

Everett Thomas blinked as Jon’s voice sounded off telepathically in his thoughts, stirring him from the brink of unconsciousness. Monet, the girl he’d previously been intimate with, was dangerously close to crushing his wind pipe. How could Adam have sunk his hooks so deep into a young woman with such an indomitable will? Everett gurgled harshly in reply to his friend’s psychic call, causing a stream of drool to fall from his open mouth down across his jaw.

{If I can feel it, I know you can too. The Amalgamation thing, Ev…it’s a giant nucleus filled with mutant power.}

Synch’s eyes widened with realization.

“Hey, bassard,” Jon said from his spot on the floor, tossing an insulting middle finger at the leering Adam, “piss off.”

Before Adam, Monet, or Doug could reply – before they could even think of reacting – Everett’s body flared with energy, the rainbow effect of his mutagenic ability enveloping the room with multi-colored light. His arms rose with the last reserves of his strength, and a telekinetic blast of pure force erupted outward, hitting St. Croix with the force of a low-yield megaton blast. The Algerian girl flew backward, crashing into the far wall of the room with enough force to bury her in a crater shaped to her muscular body.

“Oh shit!” Ramsey shouted as he dove for cover. Adam stood defiantly as Synch rose to his feet, his body pulsing with energy.

“Think on this, my child, before…” Adam began. His words were interrupted by a tearing and bending of metal behind him. The wall came to life around the mutant god, ribbons of steel folding around him in a constrictive manner.

“I copy mutant powers,” Thomas said with a smile, “and guess what I just discovered in your Amalgamation Chamber? The genetic signature of every mutant you’ve murdered, you madman.”

As the metal fibers continued to constrict around his body, Adam flexed his arms outward, easily rending and breaking the solid steel alloy. “I created this place, boy child,” he said with a fury never before heard by the young men, “and my manipulation of it far exceeds yours!”

Jon and Everett each muttered curses under their breath as Adam’s power built before them, and each knew that their all would not be enough. To their surprise, however, a light glared from beneath them. Perfect circles of golden light appeared below the two men, and they both fell into the puddles, disappearing from the presence of the ruler of Wonderland.

“Teleportation discs?” Ramsey uttered as he opened one eye, the other covered by shaking hands.

“Rasputin!” Adam bellowed, and the world shook with his anger.

Essex walked through the halls of Wonderland, satisfied that his participation in rebellion had yet to be discovered. None that passed him would allow eye contact, proving yet again that the scientist was an outcast among outcasts in the otherworldly facility. He was the only non-mutant in a place populated by genetic aberrations…had he been in his state prior to death, the man known to some as Sinister would have felt like a child in a candy store.

Adam had needed a geneticist, one to mix and match and play god with the mutant energy he had accumulated over the years. Apparently, the madman’s power had a limit, though this had been the only outwardly sign of such in all the time Essex had been in residence. Nathaniel had been plucked away at the moment of his death, reset to his baseline human form that had hindered him in the age before his encounter with Apocalypse.

En Sabah Nur; how it had pleased Sinister to discover that his former master had preceded him into the abyss. His energy had been added to the stew of mutant DNA that rested in the Amalgamation Chamber, mixed with others of equal power and principality. Apparently, there were mutants that even Adam feared, ones that had been destroyed and stripped down to their primordial energy matrixes upon their arrival in Wonderland.

Essex’s fingers danced across the electronic keypad that rested in front of the door, his status amongst the Wonderland staff giving him access to all but the most private of areas. His minions, the children of Generation X, were hard at work to accomplish their part in his master plan. He would have his freedom from servitude with the help of those young men and women, but he would be damned if he left such a wondrous place without a souvenir.

The sole occupant of the darkened room made nary a sound as Mr. Sinister approached. Reading the name ‘Summers, John’ that had been engraved at the foot of the crib, Essex reached down to the baby that rested within.

He would soon be waging a war against an insane mutant prodigy, and Essex knew that to the victor would go the spoils.

“Huh,” Jon Starsmore said as he surveyed his surroundings, “I bloody well didn’t expect that.”

Everett Thomas grimaced slightly as he felt the surge of power appropriated from the Amalgamation Chamber tear its way from his body. “I didn’t do it, Jon. Whatever teleported us away from our host, I didn’t cause it.”

The two men were alone, that much was clear, though their location was unknown – a side effect of every room in Wonderland looking exactly the same, with the cold steel walls and floors with no color whatsoever. Gunmetal gray was all they registered, and a splash of vibrant color could possibly, at this point, make their eyes bleed. They had failed in their task to steal the secrets of Adam for Essex, and now all they wanted was to find their friends and leave.

“Maybe it was Blink?” Jon asked as he hopped onto a metal examination table, taking a seat for fear of his shaking legs giving out from under him. “Maybe Paige rescued our little pink angel and now we’re all gonna go home?”

“Clarice is still in the bad place,” a young, female voice said from the center of the room, “and I didn’t want them to put you there, too.” Jon and Everett collectively jumped backward at the unexpected arrival, the little blonde girl appearing literally from thin air in a spot that had previously been empty. She couldn’t have been over ten years of age, and her voice was thick with an accent that sounded to them like Russian. She smiled, and the two men cautiously stepped forward.

“I know you,” Everett admitted, “I mean, I’ve seen your picture. Read your file. You’re Illyana Rasputin, aren’t you? Colossus’ sister?”

“I have not seen Piotr in a very long time,” she answered, “but I know he is not here. I want to go home, to my mama and papa.”

Jon exchanged a worried glance with his teammate. “We all want to go home, luv. So let’s see what we can do about it.”

Claws made of bone ripped through the flesh of the woman named Callisto, ending her life for the second time before her blood-pulsing body hit the floor. Maggott had met a similar fate mere moments before, the first of three that stood in the way of a frustrated, confused, and slightly unbalanced Wolverine. Only Jennifer Starvos, the Hellion known as Roulette, still stood at the entrance of the holding cells for those Adam had called ‘runaways’. The girl’s ability to produce bad luck on others would be little help against the maddened X-Man, and her knowledge of this had forced her bowels to release a stream of urine that was running down her leg.

Paige Guthrie stood several feet behind Logan, stepping backward to avoid the advancing pool of blood that moved toward her feet. She’d always been told of Wolverine’s tendency to lapse into “berserker rages”, but being told about them and actually seeing them firsthand were two different things altogether. “Mr. Logan,” she said cautiously, “do you have to kill her?”

“Too late for questions, Husk,” Wolverine answered as Roulette slid to the floor after being impaled on his claws, “and too late to be squeamish. We’re workin’ on a truncated time table, darlin’, and if I ain’t got time to question just why you’re workin’ for Sinister then I definitely ain’t got time to reconsider killin’ someone that’s already been dead for years.”

“Clarice is down this way,” Paige stated, wisely choosing not to press the subject of their discussion as she moved past the Canadian into the darkened hallway lined with prison cells, “and I’m working with Doctor Essex, not for him.”

“Po-tay-toe, po-tah-toe,” Wolverine remarked as he followed the younger girl to the end of the hall. He watched like a hawk and Paige entered the numbered code into the cell’s electronic lock, just as she had hours before. The door slid open with a hiss of hydraulics, revealing the nude and tortured Clarice Ferguson in her suspended state in the center of the cell.

“So how are we gonna get her out of that mess?” Husk asked. Wolverine smirked before stepping forward. His arm moved in a wide arc, cutting through the cables that held the lavender skinned Blink in the air. Ferguson fell with a thick thud to the steel plated floor, and Guthrie was at her side a moment later. “Clarice, hon?” Paige asked as she cradled Blink’s head in her lap, wiping sweaty strands of hair out of the girl’s face. “It’s Paige, please tell me you’re okay.”

“About fucking time,” were the only words that Clarice could manage as her eyes fluttered open.

“We have to stop him, Jon. Adam is evil, and we have to kill him.”

Chamber balked at what Synch had just said, a stream of profanity curbed at the last minute by the presence of the prepubescent Illyana Rasputin in their midst. “All we have to do is get out of ‘ere, mate,” he finally said after a deep breath, “let the X-Men take care of the mad bloke.”

“When we step out this door,” Everett replied, “he’s going to find us and we’ll have to fight. Can we really trust Essex, Jon? The man we knew as Sinister was about as far from trustworthy as one could get. We have no guarantee that he won’t just leave us here, do we?”

“Illyana,” Jon said as he turned around to speak with the little girl, “gel, can you ‘port us back home? Essex said that a teleporter could break through the dimensional barrier or some such shite.”

“My stepping discs won’t reach that far, Mister Jono,” Illyana replied with a sad lowering of her head. “I’m sorry.”

“That’s okay, Illyana,” Everett told her, “that just means we’ll have to make sure we rescue Clarice before Sinister does. You guys ready?”

Jon and Illyana both responded with slow nods.

Synch slid open the door, and was immediately met by the scowling face of Adam. “You children are proving to be a greater nuisance that I had imagined.”

“Bollocks!” Jon shouted as he pushed Everett aside, unleashing a blast of bioelectric energy from his palms, the burst blowing out chunks of skin and tissue as it erupted forward. Adam weathered the assault, knocked back several feet but still remaining on his feet. Behind him were Monet and Doug, both seemingly apprehensive to step forward and defend their master when it was clear that he wanted the children’s lives for his own taking. Adam recovered from Chamber’s attack almost instantly, returning the gesture with a tremendous blast of his own energy that rocked both Jon and Everett to their backsides.

“I bring you into my home, I treat you as one of my potential elite, and this is how I am treated!” Adam bellowed as energy seethed from his angered body. “I am the Son of the First, the scion of your God! I am remaking mutantkind in His image and I will NOT allow a group of spoiled infants to stand in my way! You will all bow before me or I will not hesitate to crush your skulls like eggshells!”

A loud, wet snap was the answer to Adam’s shouts, prompting him to turn in fury at whatever his next annoyance could be. Standing behind him was Monet St. Croix and the deceased Doug Ramsey, his head held in her hands in its new broken and twisted state. “You lie to your followers and proclaim to be something a sane world would not allow you to be. I had hoped to be wrong, that you were indeed a savior for the lost and weary of mutantkind…but you are a madman, Adam, and I will see you dead before I allow you to take the life of another one of our brethren.”

“Oh, thank Christ,” Jon muttered, “she’s on our side after all…”

Blink was unable to walk on her own, and Paige was forced to assist her as the two girls followed Wolverine through the hallway of cells. Clarice, while obviously still weak, was slowly regaining her strength outside of the equipment that had dulled her mind and blocked her teleportational powers. Husk was thankful for this, as her teammate and friend was possibly the only chance they had for leaving Wonderland alive.

“What the hell?” Paige blurted out as she and the girl she carried bumped hard into the halted Wolverine after his abrupt stop at the exit of the cell block. Husk looked over the shoulder of the diminutive wild man, and she breathed a nearly silent “oh shit” from her lips.

Standing between the bodies of the man and women Wolverine had killed on their way in, John Proudstar – Thunderbird – narrowed his eyes as he stared down his enemies. “Logan, please, stand down and face judgment at the hands of our lord,” the Apache warrior requested, “or I will be forced to hurt you.”

Logan smirked as his claws burst from his knuckles. Raising a clawed hand to point at the man he had all too briefly called ‘teammate’, he growled out a proclamation of his own. “Johnny, you just bought yourself a one way ticket to Claw City.”

Thunderbird scowled.

Logan leapt forward, despite the impassioned pleas of the girls behind him. “Let’s get it on!”

NEXT ISSUE: It’s the conclusion of Generation X 2.0 as all hell breaks loose in the halls of Wonderland! Will Generation X, Wolverine, Magik, and Sinister be able to defeat the mad messiah, Adam? Not everyone’s walking away from this one alive, folks!

Two Years to Tell a Five Chapter Story? Damn, I Royally Suck…

Well, after over a fucking YEAR, I’m finally back with the penultimate issue to GENERATION X 2.0. While I know my lack of regular issues is unforgivable, I hope you all take this issue and the subsequent announcements below with the sincerity that I intend. Next issue, #5, will be the last issue of GENERATION X…yeah, I can hear you now, “so what? It’s not like this series was lighting the charts on fire as it is.” In fact, it is because of my seeming inability to write this series with any regularity that is causing its cancellation at the conclusion to this story.