X-MEN/ TRANZ Frightened Off the Face of the Earth!!!
Written by Lue Lyron (featuring and dedicated to the Stern Era X-Men, an alternative predecessor to UNCANNY X-MEN #125 by Marvel Comics).


PVT. STEVE HOLT: Any other time, I’d love to be in Southern California. Even coming to this mountain on National Guard fire-training maneuvers with the Canadian Mounties isn’t the worst day I’ve had.



But now I’m sitting in the midst of a blazing ruin, beside a tank I drove over a ...troll or something, cradling a woman who saved my life, wondering if I am in love with her and why won’t she wake up.



I can’t say I’m losing my mind because of all those things. The strangest part, no, no, was all that, in the midst of the sensation I’m feeling the feelings and observing the thoughts of every person I see. I was glad to be apart, as that seem to make it quiet again in my head.


Feels like that’s about to end; someone’s reading my thoughts at this very minute. I don’t think it can be helped.


I know I can’t help how I feel about this chick. Wow: she threw me to safety, right before the hideout for these creatures blew sky high and set off this mess. I feel like she’s fighting the hidden conflict underneath it all, with her spirit, and I don’t know how I know that, but I can almost see her flying into the darkness, towards this sinister plateau of red light.


I don’t even know you, lady. You’re the most beautiful I’ve ever seen. For all I know, you’re married. Maybe I feel this way because you saved my life. Maybe it’s the adrenalin. And you’re hot. Maybe I’ve never known just what I’m doing on this planet, but maybe I’ve always wanted to feel this way.


“All you know is that you want to help her...” His mountie friend Dave Blancley has walked out of the brush, into the bright afternoon sun.
“Damn! Blancley, you read---“


“---That right out of your mind, I know, ‘Sarge’, it’s happening to everyone...is that thing under your tank alive?”

“I haven’t checked...but you know that. I’m just standing guard over this warrior lady’s body.”

BLANCLEY: On that subject, you’ll have to excuse my thoughts, buddy. Maybe she’s just in a trance!

PVT. HOLT: But you know that’s what I think.

BLANCLEY: It’s bizarre: seeing other’s inner thoughts, their loved ones, their frustrations, and every feeling that comes out fighting this wildfire.

One minute, Steve, we’re laughing over the jOYOUS Show and by the end of the day it’s like...the end of the world. Not exactly, but...you can sense it...this is happening elsewhere, too. It’s rather distracting, really; I had to get my head in the game and deal with the fire.
HOLT: I don’t know how else to thank the lady, bro, I just hope there’s more help than me.
BLANCLEY: But you will stick beside her.
HOLT: Damn right.

Perhaps it’s intuition---or some side effect of the increasing ripple effect of the Transmetamorphosis changing the Earth---but the soldier’s aware of another presence suddenly arrived upon the seen.

To stand before such a door way is to immerse one’s self in facing the direction of all one’s fears, and sense, moving forward, your survival’s path, its methods.

Now both soldiers become aware of aid, not only from the strange team of beings diving with Storm into the perilous recesses of the spreading phenomenon...
...but surfing atop turbulence as extra-dimensional energy from the astral plane is the consciousness of Professor Xavier---presently, from the rugged Muir Island!

XAVIER: In the act of discerning, clarity is everything. Sometimes, an act must be made certain with only the most doubtful perceptions.

From the core of his being, Professor Xavier becomes a mental mirror to Cerebro, his mutant detecting apparatus, an eye rolling over events of no less than a reality storm.

XAVIER: This distorting vision of the interlacing consciousnesses of the soldiers and fire fighters in the distance -as well as the Wolverine and Cyclops- suggests unprepared humanity and Earth seem destined to shatter from this process of Tranz-Rupture. The adaptation of their minds to the accelerated empathy seems achievable---yet what is this? Those who fear most seem to simply ---disappear!

BEAST: I’m incredibly grateful to be back on the scene, myself. Jean and I are “tagging in” just in time, I hope. Cerebro’s keeping up with the team, but this about the people...vanishing!

XAVIER: My scans find a little evidence of them in their passing: traces of energy that radiate outward into the corridors of the fifth dimension, hinting out some existence elsewhere in the beyond.
I think the mystery could be fathomed by someone like you, Hank, one who speculates upon the course of evolution--indeed, the hidden nature of the plan’s abandoned now, as pretense is no longer necessary in the face of naked power. I discern the energy source for this change, this rupture of normal reality, even such that it is: the M’Krann Crystal!

Its energies created a blinking of reality: fantastically, all ceased to exist in a barely detected split second, during a battle for the crystal involving my X-Men.

*See X-Men #108.

BEAST: Starcore One reported to the Avengers and FF immediately! It was beyond description...
XAVIER: Each action precedes a number of consequences, and the M’Krann “blink” was no exception. The energy was born in waves which proceeded the end of the universe, as we experienced it. All was lost, save for the destiny of a universal force which has come to be part of Jean Grey.

BEAST: We’ve barely had time to talk about the artifact source. In fact, you and I haven’t talked at all; I knew the barest bit about how she’s...changed! (thoughtful pause.)

Glad her Phoenix powers let her join the team in Southern California. They were out for a visit and decided to help with the local wildfire---what is the M'Krann Crystal?

XAVIER: The M’Krann Crystal, lies within the Shi’ar Galaxy. Its existence before the Milky Way existed has been marked with a special stargate alignment occurring regularly but extremely rarely throughout its existence. The alignment was manipulated by the mad Shi’ar Emperor D’Ken, whose ties and plans to involve Earthlings remain unrevealed. How now does an object, dormant throughout most of Eternity, shed consequences all the way from the Shi’ar Galaxy now?

Reverberations in that very blinking of existence, as recorded by Peter Corbeau via Star Core One on that occasion have been harnessed, with minimal efficiency, into the necessary transformative power to choose an acceleration of evolution in both man and Earth. Is it our duty to put this to a halt? Would this be the manipulations of one for another's?

[Border]Broken bells rustle by the oak door. Moira MacTaggert has proved a commendable tolerance, even enthusiasm, for these, her two touring guests, Charles XAVIER and The Beast. Their good conversation has led to quite an eventful afternoon.
As she turns from her wood stove top with a tray of tea, she senses something ineffable at stake.. [/Border]
He looks up. “Thank you. I trust you to understand the strenuous nature of this emergency.”
“Trouble at home?”
“You might say that.”
“Have no fear. You came to me to speak of other places where dwells the soul, friend. Now I must share my impressions with you, as I see outside you while you concentrate so feverishly.”

XAVIER: The Beast seems to be recuperating energy from contact with our friends. The Earl Gray tea is very thoughtful.

Moira: Enjoy the ease in its heat, Charley. I feel the need to tell you of the three ghosts I see---and that I see what YOU see, there with Storm!

THE BEAST: Charles, do you recognize?
XAVIER: Their language is Old Norse. They are adepts of some proficiency themselves; their intentions give me some notion what occurs in the most impenetrable place wherein Storm’s astral self has breached. She perceives her state of being by experiencing an environment about her as she plunges into the dark.

MACTAGGERT: Two are united as one...and the third is united into another pairing, as though merged, captured, contained...by one who is not of this world.

THE BEAST: Cerebro’s actually letting me keep touch with Ororo’s mind as she dives into the inner, exposed layer...his existence is growing so complex as to begin to unfold, as though archeypally.
XAVIER: Yet the wolf is a pawn, I think, to some greater outside presence!


THE BEAST: Nonetheless, Charles, it seems sure that this werewolf enchanter---his body, essences stolen from outside the known universe, yet bonded with something---human. Perhaps it’s a mutant?
XAVIER: If this being is composed of a dual nature, perhaps that way---holds the key to humanity grabbing some stake in the actions that cut and paste
The world we know.
He nods. He begins to probe where the energies radiate, how they mix with the very fundamental place where human thought becomes human reality. “But should I discern the nature of this Transmetamorphosis,” he asks himself, “what then?”
Indeed---what then?

The Beast re-establishes contact with Storm, and now MACTAGGERT, XAVIER and The Beast all see the two ghosts united.

In bolts of lightning are the two embodied: she, inside of him, and he, the very electricity commanded by the mutant X-Man.
Storm’s lips carry a song from her days as the goddess...adrift in her own environment, Storm bears down upon the dark arena
where stands the transfixed wolf-man-god: Remus Sharptooth, drawing a techno-sorcerous circuit
triangulating the M’Krann energies and manipulation from the future itself,
as the world of our knowledge shatters.

A whale watching boat full of passengers passes a submarine, surprisingly close to the surface in San Diego Bay. We over hear them randomly:


The news feed just mentioned a wilderness fire, but it’s somewhere north of here.

The whole loo shook, pitched right off the bowl! Expected as much: I come on deck, the weather’s become very violent.

I would separate your attraction from people from your decision to talk to anyone, especially when you have designs on what that person should be to you...

It did happen unexpectedly, but they expect to dock in time

We’re only some three miles out on the pennisula.

I mean, separate your attraction from your reaction. Also, you don’t want to make the mistake of just talking to a girl because she’s pretty.

At least we got to see loads of whales!

That was Taft.

Bad news for the whales, though---isn’t that one caught on the beach over there?

Your carnal impulses might separate you from a good friendship...

Got a picture of one’s tail over starboard! That’s seven for me!
Wish I had the patience to try that approach; you’re probably ri—whoa!

Are those dolphins?
I think that whale’s really stuck!
It’s this storm. I’ve never seen anything like –

I think it’s just frustration, over time, that our efforts to help her...cure herself of her bad habits don’t seem to have worked. Yet she knows by now I won’t gi-- Damn, did you feel us drop into that trough?!?

These are shallow waters, already. The stuck one looks pregnant!

Okay, now, I see a man flying through the sky. Just so we’re all the Beastr on that.
Look! Over this side! These waves are coming out of nowhere; they must be fifteen feet!

Drowning was not my first beach birthday option, frankly!

That’s the feckin’ Submariner. Sod me, he’s real!!! Hahaha!

What the hell are you---oh, wow, wow, a man is lifting a whale!!!

The Savage Submariner, Prince Namor, busies himself rescuing breeding whales trapped in the shallow waters beside Baja California, as the earth ruptures. As he tenderly raises the bedraggled behemoth from the rocky shoals, he perceives the mystical joining of twin eternal flames, and their entry into a great mouth of darkness.
Drawing closer to the shore exposes him to the waves of emotions of those below; he strives to separate his thoughts from theirs.

NAMOR: By the Seven Seas, it is good the Avenging Son chose today to watch over the breeding whales; I have never witnessed such a tempest on the Pacific Coast!
There is something more here, amiss. My perceptions give me no recourse however. This very unease I feel closer to civilization might be my impetus---might goad the monarch of Atlantis to discover what secret imparts these dangers and mysteries.
What I do know is these beasts need the strong arm of Namor the First!

Mount Palomar, California: inside a cavern, beside a wildfire, raging across a mile of land...
(thinkingJEAN:
As we sneak into the mountain together, I’m suddenly feeling very lucky. Imagine, we follow some kind of gnomlin creature through the woods and meet the ultimate computer whiz --- made of machine head to toe.

The Machine Man gives me the thumbs up, and just cuts gravity to float into the device somewhere three or more stories off the ground, built right here in the cave floor! While the Living Robot gets digital with Super Computer from the Future, you have your work cut out for you, Miss Grey!

Disturbances in the passages of the timeline are disrupting the efforts of Professor Xavier and The Beast to monitor us out here on the Coast. Cerebro's their only link---besides whatever help I might be able to provide in boosting its clarity--- a way to aid and observe Storm and her ghostly partners. For now, I’ve got to let all this slip my mind. If this sorcerer reads minds, why open the whole playbook? One thing is no secret, though: I’m headed straight to the corporeal brains behind this operation.

The advanced science at hand seems to tap into a natural force of change inherent in the Earth, sped up now, affecting all the biosphere.

I was being careful, in case of mind control, too, but this is deeper. This isn’t just my mind---this is a sea change, and we’re all just swimming along. But can we figure out if this tide is right or wrong in time to change it? It’s...fascinating. Swirl of emotions...reshaping of the natural world, like some time lapsed photography of thousands of years of geothermal tantrums.

Everything you know about the entire fabric of the world, in its physical and mental states, undergoes a rupture, in waves of increasing change! At its core is an alien sorcerer, Remus Sharptooth, conjuring what he believes is the rapid evolution in nature and human consciousness!
I levitate the length of the corridors, and three minutes later, I find the wolfman. Now I even my pace, as though no, I’m not scared in the slightest. Here's your chance to try the open hand, Jean Grey.

Empty mind.

I get close enough to observe his "ritual space" before I'm spotted. I notice this amazing box, but all my attention goes to...Remus Sharptooth. I feel you at the borders of my mind.
So let’s be friends, huh? I’m Jean Grey! Who is the handsome fellow under all that fuzz!

REMUS: I DO have a handsome fellow inside!! Snarl!! Don't taunt me, fetching one!

What is your purpose here?

His mixed essential nature becomes an apparent truth.

Jean: "Have I struck a nerve?"
(thinks) He’s both flattered and...defensive...what is going ON here? It’s like two minds... or even make that three or four at play; we’re not alone! There’s one I see above, and some other around me---!

REMUS: A nerve, a body, a sliver, a cell!
How would you know! --know what it’s like : plucked out of one history, one continuity, one set of stories, and put together in some new, melded form?

JEAN GREY: You might be surprised what i know about that!

Wolfie, I have to be frank, I get no sense you as either inherently good or evil...is this thing happening with everyone’s opening inner lives permanent? What’s going on? Help me make sense of what you are doing here...you can feel some people are afraid, and I picture some disappearing, as though frightened off the face of the earth!

REMUS: You sense it, do you not? Yes, particularly with the gifts I sense within you...you are the first living human I’ve yet encountered here. I do not seek to persuade nor offend you.
JEAN GREY: Could I help you figure out why you seem so uncomfortable?
REMUS: i KNOW not your role, nor bare enough, mine. Two voices in me, divided serving my master---
Sulinar Vix! Let the crystal power flow, as now all dragons arise. Let all become so wide minded as they, Returned One! Almighty Zavox, power of the empirical world, let rupture forth your change across the hastened reality of this planet!

JEAN GREY: So bright! Vibrations...hurt! it’s like agony with his spell.

Sensing her ESP probe, Remus turns it around and responds with an effusive overload her perceptions with accurate interactions as they occur throughout the effected space/ time of Transmetamorphosis, including the minds of ever more humans. The natural turning of the world towards this ultimate change begins to seduce Jean Grey, as she envisions a world of empathy.

Such a world, however, cannot be held hostage by terror. Now she sees the image of the one Remus calls Sulinar Vix, who feeds the M’Krann powers to Remus, equipped in some alien armor...

SULINAR VIX (above great dissonance and wind):
The purpose of your incarnation here is at hand, Remus Sharptooth. Open this world by your imagination...use these energies to unwrap the form of the Slay Box/ Slave Box to trigger the Five Dragons to End the Earth!

JEAN GREY:
Where did that gigantic black she-wolf come from? It’s ---She’s on the trail of my new metallic playpal; could being a machine camouflage his scent?

The She Wolf turns towards Jean Grey now,
eyes glowering red, as it doubles in size.
Whoa! Congrats, you’re bait now...try not to end up wolf chow!

Hidden inside the data base banks, a purple-tinted robot, in the form of a man, examines circuits with glowing eyes, his hands interfaced with components inside the super machine decode the digital analysis.

MACHINE MAN: I think of what these explosions must sound like to regular guys like those soldiers I bumped into in the woods, before finding that weird hutch.
I wonder what their world will be like, as the colossal disturbances of these superbeings fill the air with the promise of forces beyond their control?

Ah, this supercomputer identifies as Sharptooth, guarded by his partner the she wolf Corpse Flower, beside the extraordinary devices used to focus the M’Krann energies.

Extraordinary: the after effects of an event beyond even my ability to see, to the Milky Way’s edge!

MACHINE MAN (thinking) And what of the origin of this source, tapped by Sharptooth; these machines, I’d estimate, reflect the engineering genius at least 5,000 very optimistic years of human existence. Is that where Sharptooth and company came from? Somehow, it seems the source of this machinery holds the strings back to the puppeteer of this whole she-bang!

Another part of the revelations of the nature of this power and transformation comes from Machine Man’s digital analysis. Jean Grey senses Corpse Flower’s manipulation of fundamental forces, her eyes aglow with malevolent inteligence, aware Machine Man’s intrusion. She breaks stasis of action to attempt to distract Corpse Flower, which helps, but imperils her life.

Now it’s Machine Man’s turn: he telescopes his arm with her sitting on his palm, setting her high atop the machines out of the way.

MACHINE MAN: I realize I can’t be the first guy to put you on a pedestal, my pretty friend!

JEAN: I'm momentarily safe, but someone must disrupt Remus Sharptooth now! My psi-shields keep me masked for now. If I dive for him, engage him in the physical plane....time to open my psi-link with Kurt, so he can see through me where to teleport; we'll double team!

Sharptooth is alert; he breaks out the blue flash balls to play 'chase!'

KURT (NIGHTCRAWLER): What's going on behind this platform?
JEAN (activating Phoenix force): Another plane; feels almost like the subconscious, like some deprivatory tank, floating in darkness. Well, as a telekinetic, if the Phoenix is ready to stan firm, she just wills a bottom to meet her boots and allow her to walk.
This being Sulinaro Vix has erected a translucent shield. What's this glow?

KURT( NIGHTCRAWLER): That's Storm! Possessed of a transfixing light.
JEAN: Machine Man appears, and I find myself easily reading his mind. It's...different; the information's very readily offered. His...humanity catches me a bit ...off-guard!

KURT: He's pointing to the Slay Box I noticed (what is that word I obtained; was it "slay" or "slave"?)

MACHINE MAN: It's Remus again! Do you see---
Machine Man and Phoenix gaze inside the field, tight around the Box: within the darkness drifts a giant head, a cavernous maw of doom. Before it flies Storm, with Viking ghosts, embodied in crackling lightning.

On a fantastic plane of the mind and soul, Sharptooth’s head "devours" them!

As Storm, buoyed gently upon the weather of her own being, drifts towards the great gate of Sharptooth’s defenses, her lightning lights the presence of two time lost Vikings connected to the great change---and fly they must. Only inside the jaws of utter destruction can they find their way to the mystery of this conjurer...only so may they reach the humanity captured within!




[Caption=]Before the eyes of those assembled to fire fight, Cyclops and the
Wolverine begin to disappear in the physical sense...yet the darkness into which they reappear is present before everyone! They watch this central event, as thought forms of all the X-men surround the Sharptooth sorcerer. Nightcrawler is teleporting the X-Men in turn through the Slave Box, where they attempt to materialize inside a further plane representing Sharptooth’s apocalyptic plan.

They reappear, locked out of reach but able to see a trifecta of beings, one of whom is the Enchantress.[/Caption]

WOLVERINE: Did I hallucinate seeing that wolf head swallow up Storm? Blasted place, it’s got no scent!

Cyclops: Over there---do you see where my beam's lightly traced some nearly transparent barrier?
Wolverine: Yeah, shine your ever lovin' light on, bub.


From the shadowy reaches of the violet arena of space surrounding Sharptooth, three mysterious forms of indigo observe a towering man-form, crackling with power, robed with sharp, probing angles that reach like a castle of doom from his shoulders and head.
Before him appears a blond, beautiful enchantress dressed in emerald and black, leering.

“Even should these meddlesome freaks discover the double nature of your pawn---pawn, or prince of the world to come---as an immortal of Asgard, I shall live on, either way!

SULINAR VIX: Behold, the self-styled heroes advance now from the abyss. You, who bound the warrior to the wolf sorcerer--- what payment do you extract?


ENCHANTRESS: “Come what may,I will take my rewards where I find them. I cast this spell upon her, who is also two people in one; the goddess maiden, the woman beneath. In the fortuitous hour of my plans, to bind within the Norn stones...and when they again become mine...but hark now, ‘tis done! Amora takes her leave, Sulinar Vix of Kolpar!”

With a lift of his chin, he regards her.
SULINAR VIX: May you scheme in interesting times!
With a humorless laugh, at the nimbus of a spell, she vanishes.



Wolverine still strains to carve against the barrier; Cyclops trains his eye beam with enormous will.

The three indigo forms consult with one another telepathically, grateful to have thus escaped notice. They see Sulinar Vix cast a light over the Machine Man, probing him as the heroes advance from the nothingness. Then he turns to an approaching form, a tall, ebony young man, who seems to espy them, by his eyes; to Sulinar Vix, his face reveals nothing. “So now,” he speaks, “upon my birthday visit to this world, I await the completion of the spell of the wolf...”

SULINAR: By Sennil, the Dark Poet! No doubt, you seek what is taken from Semeicardia.
DARK POET: Your fellow Sinister has engineered cells swiped there, to become henchmen to your pawn of pawns. His fate also belongs to Semeicardia.
CYCLOPS: I feel like someone’s walked over my grave...

SULINAR VIX: These are the last moments of the Spell of the Wolf. I bid you observe the resolution of this gambit, Dark Poet, and we shall see if the nature of the world yet shall be formed by the Tranz-Rupture.”



[Caption=]The triplet forms observe the dark Poet dissolve into the indigo light as he walks on, while the wolf sorcerer conjures fierce lights, bolts of power escaping his claws.
Nightcrawler has now reappeared from the interface zone about Slay Box with Colossus.
The Wolverine leads the others in shredding the way into the force field, and seem unstoppably close.[/Caption]

Vix: Take now your four-armed henchmen and she-wolf by your side, Sharptooth---be done with these, bring about the Spell of the Wolf! The towering form of the Fire Dragon shall represent the first manifestation of the four elements. Let the future find its purchase in your present!


[Caption=]Now Jean appears with Machine Man and Nightcrawler.[/Caption]
NIGHTCRAWLER: Unglaublich! Jean, you figured out how to tap Slave Box and use psionic means to teleport us to this plane!
MACHINE Man: Is this proof I am, at least, a conscious mind?
NIGHTCRAWLER: Vast ist?
MACHINE MAN: How else could my mind be transferred to this battlefield? The information I recorded seemed to give her the insight to crack the code, so to speak, on the Slave Box!

NIGHTCRAWLER: Good thing for me! Not sure how much longer I could’ve held out!
The Box they had guarded together is conjured from outside time and space to reappear here and focus the energies of the Tranz-Rupture. They, its final guardians, the last defenders of humanity, have come to this place and time to prevent it once more from being misused: then, as a weapon of war, and now, as an agent to shape all of human consciousness and the earth itself.
STORM: the souls of Prince Nicola Dragonvayne and the Marc Kane align in the fires of living lightning. I have carried you this far; now there is nothing I can do.
JEAN: within the energies of you, my best friend, Storm, we can surprise the sorcerer!”

So they do: with a strike wielded like a sword, flowing with the Flames of the Phoenix. Remus divides into two complete beings; a weak, stunned Viking Captain in tan danskins and helmet speaks a single word: “Kano.” The wolf sorcerer pulls him up by the throat, claws biting, Storm and Wolverine rushing to the spot.


mERRY cHRISTMAS my friends.

(I've split the end in two to keep the post shorter, okay?)

With the focused power of the mutants cleaving now, from its nimbus springs Remus Sharptooth, grappling viciously with Storm.
As though by mitosis, the other half of Sharptooth’s form, the essence of the sorcerer is revealed: her lost brother, Ray, taken by the enchantress’ spell between his vanishing at the Break through and the Unknown.

THE BEAST: Nicola Dragonvayne and the Marc Kane have breached a critical point in the make-up of this being---the very fulcrum of his pastiche existence. What lies within? Where does this occur, that Cerebro can track the psyches of the X-Men along the same mental plane?
XAVIER: i feel sure this hidden being was aiding them in finding the way inside Remus’ mind. The identities of these ancient guardian psyches are now more clear: searchers, in a dark age lost to antiquity; the present age bears museums spotted still with artifacts and treasures they assembled. Those caretakers' last mission involved the deadliest secret of their era.
The Box they had guarded together is conjured from outside time and space to reappear here and focus the energies of the Tranz-Rupture. They, its final guardians, the last defenders of humanity, have come to this place and time to prevent it once more from being misused: once, as a coveted weapon of war, and now, as an agent to shape all of human consciousness and the earth itself.
Thousands of years of greater understanding of the Box are at play---the present spell of the wolf that holds Transmetamorphosis together, that increasingly makes all in its contagious awareness to feel everywhere in presence. Many, indeed, vanish for the stars beyond---so porous is the command of intention over reality.

WOLVERINE: Show you an animal, boy!

RAY AWEN : Abril and Prince Dragonvayne---boon companions, half of your natural born lives---
MARC KANE: ,Do not quit fighting, Ray!!!
RAY AWEN: Swam now I have from the brackish mind of the wolf. Emerged, I find myself, my essence, bound to a most grandiose trickster.

PRINCE NICOLA: We were sundered during our mission: break through enemy lines, dispose of Slave Box. Ray, it’s still happening; we’re needed!
RAY AWEN: Who says?

MEANWHILE, the X-Men battle: Wolverine challenges Remus, Cyclops and Nightcrawler battle the Four Armed Men; Storm and Colossus tackle the she wolf Corpse Flower; Phoenix grapples with the eighty story Fire Elemental Dragon.

MARC KANE! The slightest breach in our rapport did render us vulnerable, as the heathen hordes did challenge us before I took the Box in my charge to the volcano.

RAY: the break-through...the ice must've melted, we were merely a day too late in the year, and like thunder did the land beneath our boots cave...cave into a world of smoke, fire, and darkness. Your name, my disguised sister: Abril! That was the last word from my lips as we fell...

MARC KANE: Ray, YOU caught me into the world with your bare hands, as I cried and our mother grew
cold. I have ever been the student of all things you do, brother. I only wish I could’ve reached you, through whatever malevolence manipulated us apart . But here we are, now.


NICOLA: If we can find a way back to the Box, we may yet wrest it from the Spell of the Wolf.
RAY: Well I know those fantastic machines, from my time spent as the essence of Remus Sharptooth. Without my body, he cannot resume his place in the material present!


Marc (Abril): The Dragon’s Line is together again. Though this battle be never ending, it is given to us to set things right.

RAY: But now---to reach that other side---must I rejoin as one to the Wolf?

Nearby...

COLOSSUS: Must we leave this unreality to survive?

CYCLOPS: May be no way out. We’ll have to fight them on their turf, outgunned though we may be. Kurt! I want you to teleport each of us back behind what’s left of that barrier; we need to regroup!
NIGHTCRAWLER: ja wohl!

STORM: Jean, can we help you deal with this trans-mind phenomenon? Can we provide humanity with some kind of ---switch?

JEAN: Who can say for certain what humanity would choose? It’s the mental habits of human kind that make this nearly impossible to absorb---but the power it’s tapping...shines like the solution to everything we know. Scott, I can give humankind the opportunity to stop it---I have an idea---but should I? Why are we set up as judges of all evolution?

WOLVERINE: Tell you truth, darlin’ ---you can only force so much change on a person before it’s up to them to let it stick. I don’t care at all for forcing a body to act against their will. If it’s meant to be, it’ll happen.
JEAN: You call that an answer?
WOLVERINE: Maybe nothin’ to do about it, now. But if there’s a choice, it’s only fair.

COLOSSUS: What can we do besides fight these nightmares on this dream-like plane?

NIGHTCRAWLER: i COULD try taking us back through the chamber that held the Box.
JEAN: Give me a minute to design our “trigger” and we’ll load it with the world outside.
STORM: Quickly! This “environment” here is becoming useless to manipulate.

Escape from the Dark Corner of the Mind

STORM: While a trans-rupture spreads across human minds---some of whom are already risking their lives against a wilderness blaze---we remain in this astral realm. I was first to enter: I joined the Vikings, to guard against those manipulating the Slay Box from their time a thousand years before! In fact, I sense a vague affinity for their location; they attempt to dissuade the use of the box by Remus Sharptooth and his futuristic patron.

COLOSSUS: Even here, these waves are creating a---how do you call, a dissonance! I have flashes of distorted impressions of the rest of you!


MACHINE MAN: At first I wondered if we’d actually breached some type of spiritual plane---which would definitely give me something to chew on later! Yet, because they are bounded by electrical impulses, I can utilize the signature of our brain patterns to keep up with everyone. Which is funny, because we haven’t really for the most part been introduced properly!
JEAN: I didn’t know telepathy could be used to read an artificial intelligence mind, but I can---and with your permission, I’m going to share that perception of our mind wave locations, to orient the team.
MACHINE MAN: Granted. It’s an open mind, anyway.


JEAN: I still psionically detect our world; the location just beyond this pocket dimension is in the midst of turbulent psychic change and natural disaster.
COLOSSUS: Except, possibly, for Marvel Girl, I do not see what good we can do unless we find our way back to Earth.

NIGHTCRAWLER: Right now, we exist at an extra-dimensional tangent to the same location. If I could figure out my location back in regular space/time in relation to this.
CYCLOPS: It’s odd enough that we still perceive time, and to some degree, space, in a similar fashion to before. So we need to return to where this mentally-generated plane shares coordinates with the place in Southern California we just left!


JEAN: Here, I can prepare some kind of coping mechanism for the minds of everyone afflicted by this dimensional anomaly; that may be the key to stopping it all together. This may be as close to impossible as healing the M’Krann Crystal itself when these very energies were leaked into the world!
STORM: As with them, Jean, we are at your utter disposal to assist anyway we can.



CYCLOPS: You...you are Machine Man. I’m Cyclops, and these are most of the X-Men. You and Jean encountered the super-computer responsible for channeling the power to create this cross-the-board metamorphosis. Did you record details of the schemata that would help us, then, with the secondary problem of re-locating us to Earth?
MACHINE MAN: It may be impossible to quantize gravity in 3+1 dimensions without creating matter and energy artifacts.
WOLVERINE: Nother words, you need a flashlight?

MACHINE MAN: I meant it in a computational sense, but yes, actually, that’s one way to put it!
JEAN: Matter of fact, I’m reading a “ping” signal calibrated like Cerebro; Hank and Charles are utilizing our mutant detector to attempt retrieving us. But---the rupture’s taking nearly all my attention! Such phenomenal power! I must enter Earth with the counter-measure prepared; time’s fleeting, and I don’t know if even we can restore sanity to an entire planet!
CYCLOPS: If we can pull together something approximating our target, perhaps my eyebeam can issue a target location.


NIGHTCRAWLER: From the schematics, I have a picture of the location of the room with the Slay Box. Unglaubich! I ---may be ready.
JEAN: I’ll supplement you; can you feel the Cerebro probe? I see it forming in your mind.
CYCLOPS: Here’s your target; my beam extends out of sight. I am not sure how far this will be, Kurt.
WOLVERINE: Or if it’ll work.

NIGHTCRAWLER: You’ll...never get anywhere...thinking ..._*BAMF*_
[Caption=]Like THAT!![/Caption]

WOLVERINE: Are we in...mid-port?!? I smell...brimstone...reality...smell anything...can hear, this way!

JEAN: Kurt, you did it!

WOLVERINE: I had to use my senses to nail down just where things are! Flamin’ astral realms!

BLANCLEY: Is she choking?

STORM: Uhhh...I...feel the moisture gather on the wind...and the static of lightning building in the clouds. I am---awake! Here!
HOLT: Glad you can tell where “here” and “there” are, it’s getting hard to know!
STORM: At last the rains have come to quench the blaze---but now, have I done what most I could for you firefighters and soldiers?
BLANCLEY: What lurks within this plane of battle, I suspect has more to do with the realm we saw...

STORM: The plane we just visited, you---I see it in your eyes, you have both seen---there is some understanding passing amongst everyone.
HOLT: Are we becoming mind-readers?
BLANCLEY: It’s there the real war is fought; there’s nothing to do nor nothing, I suspect, to save us here besides one’s resolution to sheer courage, here in this wave-like schizophrenia!

STORM: My instincts ---my flesh wants to peel from the bones that choose to tread beside Cyclops and Phoenix in that cave! I feel the intense psychic pain and paranoia that has bitten like a prehistoric animal from the unreflective turmoil beneath them!
BLANCLEY: It is akin to quicksand...we resemble a mountain climbing team, jeopardized by the fall of those tied to their survival.

STORM: My thanks for your chivalry. Your courage fuels my own.

Storm flies above. )


BLANCLEY: Just don't give up, eh?

She sweeps in gracefully,
taking the shortest X-Man skyward. "Whuff!!"
Wolverine adjusts quickly to his altered velocity and altitude

JEAN:

Now with the team’s arrival back in three dimensional space beside time, my makeshift “switch” is ready.

As I empathically aligned myself with the web of telepathic connections, I thought of the day Sara was hit as we played in the street---my first telepathic experience---her dying thoughts. It’s nearly as intense for everyone so far affected.Their confusion, their desire to heal one another, inspire one another, dominate one another---and all the realms of daydream, exposed without relief!

So...some relief, or insanity!
I’m reminded of Wolverine; the glimpses into his mind...like treading water above a great depth, while trying to find the way back to land. He’s actually the closest model to sanity I have at hand, for dealing with similar...baggage!
His past: stitched together in ways even he is not fully aware---and I feel what he feels for me. I open myself, this one time, to wonder: what is it, really, in ourselves that forces our love to be...exclusive? But in Scott’s case, the poor guy and I...he’s the flipside to what it is I need here:
the very special brain of Scott Summers. For some time now, I’ve explored how it is that he cannot turn his mutant power—his deadly eyebeams---on and off. With the power of the Phoenix, however, lies the key---to a freedom transcendent I’ve wanted to offer him--- to try with him, part of the most special present I can.
That template---that power, uncontrollably raging in the brain--- I stir into the empathic “mix”, suggested to this localized, affected microcosm of the universal mind---that the choice is theirs. Let the power flow...or shut it off. Only mankind, as Wolverine rightly said, can know if they are ready---if this is the way life on Earth evolves, on a scale unknown to precedent.

STORM: The wind system created by the superheated plains is sucking the air away, all around it!
How do I tame these fire whirls are spit from the center of the firestorm---the jet stream's feeding a tower of flame!
I must reach outside the system, to bleed the jet stream of its ferocity, or no amount of rain I can bring here will be in time!

At the edge of the barrier, inside the cavern between the pillars of the Super Computer, Remus and Ray undergo a struggle that physically resembles a cellular mitosis. Remus tries to keep his composite identity together, but Ray only wants to be free.

KANE: Ray is free!
RAY: Yes! ---to reach you, the Kane and Dragonvayne, and unite around the box!

Sulinar Vix and Corpse Flower pour their powers above and below; futuristic and ancient powers struggle with the Dragon’s Line. Divided from Captain Ray, Remus lacks the substance to maintain full power. On the floor of the cavern they stand; the three, side by side, and the sorcerer, some fifty feet away, crackling with energy guard, his long jacket's sleeves bearing crossed arms, with massive fingers!.

REMUS SHARPTOOTH: No! Snarrgh! ! I become immaterial!!! BUT as you become more material...you also become more vulnerable! Behold the Fire Element, feel the claws of the dragon, as I call the heat from the blaze surrounding this mountain...to sear your bodies, as the volcano should have, a thousand years ago!

All about the supercomputers, powerful heat begins to blast into the side of the mountain; the vikings become more material as their will has more attraction with the Box.

KANE: I have had no body and lived as flame. The magicks of my soul can grant us some surcease from this mighty heat...
RAY: As we reach for the Box, sister, we become more entangled in this physical plane! Soon, we will draw breath again...in a place without air!


Suddenly, a hundred feet away, the X-Men burst into the heated chamber,
lit by a horrid orange flame light,
beneath great helium lamps above the three rows of mainframes,
centered by the dais of Slave Box.
CYCLOPS: Team! Converge on the heart of this super computer! Jean, please, can you..?
JEAN: The cavern’s layout is in your thoughts, on the peripheral left, people.

NICOLA: If we can move the Box from its stasis, perhaps we can remove it from this time stream!
CYCLOPS: The man’s thoughts are transparent as glass; the Box is the objective! Nightcrawler!

JEAN: Professor! I sense...!
XAVIER: Thank you, Jean. Alex and Lorna were here to monitor Cerebro; Lorna was using her magnetic powers to probe for structural damage when the surge of psychic backlash fed them BOTH impressions, a virtual reality of the battle: as though this crisis used my telepathy to begin flooding this environs, too!

LORNA: My powers were in use already---sorry for the room, Professor---but you kept from releasing your blast, Alex. I’m proud of you!
HANK: Jean, this molecule I’m thinking about---An L-Theanine! pick this image out, to add to your telepathic “touch”...

JEAN(telepathically): Many thanks, Hank!

ALEX: Hank, I nearly totaled you---I thought I was THERE with my brother and the other X-Men, under attack!

XAVIER, thinking: Jean is using ESP to suggest the image of a natural amino molecule, L-Theanine, drawn from the mind of Hank McCoy and meant to stimulate dopamine sensors that elevate the underlying emotional level to meet the extraordinary demands of the Tranzmetamorphosis.

Her plan to shut the aperture is our last hope of restoring those affected by the trauma---the sheer power and facility is a thousand times what she possessed as Marvel Girl.

And there, within the mountain maelstrom...

NIGHTCRAWLER: This image of the Phoenix bird pushes the firestorm heat into the stratosphere? Unglaublich! Then I must join you, Cyclops, in the cavern...how have you not burned to a crisp?
CYCLOPS: My body utilizes ambient energies, ‘crawler! I seem to be metabolizing this for my laser beams...which I’m using to pepper the wolf sorcerer. But that Box is key! And X-Men--- Let’s wipe out the machine!
(Insinuated in the Super Computer’s mainframe, Machine Man’s trying to hijack the dimensional nexus in which the Slave Box is suspended. His telescoped eyes take in Storm’s efforts outside the cave, as cold meets billowing heat.)


[Caption=]Storm focuses within and reaches again to the Pacific winds leading into the fiercely fueled firestorm.[/Caption]

Within the back row of hard data banks...
MACHINE MAN (aloud): I’ve never seen a construction of this complexity! It rivals the human brain for its sheer enigmatic schemata!

COLOSSUS: Should I try to destroy it?
MACHINE MAN: I think I can override it with my digital ‘lock picks’: render the complex safe until the thing just stops? Do i TRY to send the whole thing to the future? It would be handier if I pushed the whole thing into the past. But who knows what the consequences of that would be? forward or back? Either way, are we dumping our problems on some other generation? If I push across space, the odds...

CORPSE FLOWER (from the shadows, about fifteen feet away, leaping)

: Die! Die!!!

Colossus fights the She Wolf, Corpse Flower.
Suddenly Wolverine cracks his back,
hands clasped behind, then barrels in,
sending himself
and the larger-than-human She Wolf rolling,
going fang and claw against one another.



MACHINE MAN: There’s a sector about four meters by seven wide that feeds the galactic crystal power to the machine. There’s an incalculable risk to your life, but it can be rendered inert. I'm imparting a reverse magnetic charge through you...
COLOSSUS: Go for it!

NIGHTCRAWLER: While it’s short circuiting, I’ll teleport the Slay Box out of its “battery” position: it's about seventy feet, straight up

*BAMF!* ---and perhaps help our every-less-ghostly Viking friends remove it from here!


SULINAR VIX: While you traverse the world between places in your world, wretched creature...you are most vulnerable to one who walks freely amidst the many planes of co-existence!
NIGHTCRAWLER: Vast ist? Nein!

When Kurt Wagner materializes in the air above the blue nexus processor, he falls violently, as though struck from above. At the same time, over a hundred feet away, Colossus rushes into the targeted, yellow-bright area.

.


COLOSSUS: Shto! It feels---invigorating!

(The ground itself rebels as he runs;
with massive force, the mutant Russian
slams into the core of the super computer’s operations.

Then Machine Man imparts an anti-gravity field
about himself and Colossus, and from above,
he hurls the steel-skinned X-Man into the machine once more,
amidst sparks and carnage of hardware.)

Wolverine’s distracted by Kurt’s fall
from the energy ridden crown of the blue dais;
the she-wolf then doubles in size.
He battles for leverage in her mouth.

From fifty feet away,
facing towards the corridor
in which the Phoenix first confronted Sharptooth.
Now, Storm has flown in to face the sorcerer.

STORM: The winds will blast you apart, sorcerer! Do not risk your life for this!
REMUS: You, the child of your own people’s future---why would YOU not understand? Tomorrow knocks restlessly at the door of your world. Heed the call; heed the salvation of all!!!
(Sharptooth grasps the air before him;
a psuedo-plastic hand appears to cover Captain Ray.
Captain Ray exerts all his strength:)

RAY: Live or die! I will be free!!! It was MY pride that forced me to keep the Box until we reached the volcano---to let me be corrupted by distractions that left our task incomplete, upon the breakthrough of the ice! But I will see this Box in the hands of no one, Wolf!

MARC KANE: The Wolf cannot defeat this storm mistress in time to re-unify his self and complete the spell; already, the summoned “cosmic-blink” energies destabilize.

Some hundred feet away

, in the shadows, Corpse Flower swallows the feral mutant with a blazing red-eyed glaze of satisfaction.
NICOLA: of all the mysterious phantasms explored in our spiritual lives, Marc---never have enigmatic secrets been so thrust before our realization.
RAY: The Box, my prince! We’re moving it!!
MARC: I'm...not sure how long...we can hold it free...
RAY: iF we simply push it back along the time stream, who knows what hands may yet reach out?

NICOLA: iT'S got to spin off into "plus space": free from the hands of any in this reality.

CYCLOPS: Nightcrawler’s zapped! Wolverine’s swallowed whole! I wouldn’t count either of them out yet---but it’s down to me!

With reflexes trained carefully over countless hours...Cyclops misses

.
CYCLOPS: Nothing’s what it seems. What IS this?!?
COLOSSUS: However we have warranted this strife, Sharptooth...my friends and I fight for humanity’s free will---

Again: Cyclops misses.

Some twenty feet behind him to the left,
Colossus smashes again and again
Remus Sharptooth's crackling forcefield, flickering
with each blow.
CYCLOPS (thinking): Why does it feel...natural? When humankind takes its steps into the unknown---when any living ecosystem does---when any species does—can we say we know best when and what is changed?

COLOSSUS: Though these terrifying changes are given no explanation, save fate...though your power dwarfs my own...yet I will keep-- keep your attention!

From thirty feet away,
on the other side of the energy field
within the hollow-chambered blue dais:

RAY AWEN: Beware, warrior--- the Slave Box!

CYCLOPS: Yet---for any intent on destroying or moving the Box---is there some corrupting influence that leads one to wish to preserve it?

JEAN: The one thing that’s held it together so far: the flexible minds, the people mystified but unperturbed, concentrating---the ones who keep stable in crisis. Their presence within the empathic resonance opens the door to sanity for everyone.


CYCLOPS (in thought,
as energy rips freely
throughout the chamber containing
the link for the power of the mysterious Box):

I don’t know if Jean could control this many minds---she’s essentially providing the last strand of sanity from their own latent fortitude--within the people caught in this thought wildstorm.

Are these frightful sensations---our growing pains? Are we all meant to understand the world---as Charles, or Jean might?

But I, of anyone, know what it is to suffer another dimension invade through your mind! My body, my brain...is an aperture to a plane of destructive energy...the source of my metabolized rays. And I’ve never been able to truly stop them, only shield my surroundings with this containing ruby quartz visor.

Despite the frozen feeling of time, the consequences of the transmetamorphosis continue to insinuate themselves in an ever growing presence, rampaging creation and human minds alike like nothing in memory. So many find the key---their energy, which reveals they inhabit this globe only by a choice---and all the cosmos may be roamed, as imagination and existence increasingly become one. At what moment, too---will this become---irrevocable?

CYCLOPS: This fear---of their own destructive or healing potential---it’s driving the change chaotically. But---they can never decide---if they are not free of that Box!

In the middle of the magical confrontation,
Wolverine begins to tear his way free
from the belly of the gigantic Corpse Flower.
All three villains and all three Vikings
struggle to maintain or remove the box,
within about thirty feet of one another..


WOLVERINE: Ahgghh! *pant* Huck*gasp...Summers!!!

A Figure...a shadowy bogeyman, who floods Scott Summers with a memory of fright at nine years old, seems to pass within the nexus...metallic glint, and a laser glance at a soul-eating smile...and he remembers the sights that greeted himself and the X-Men upon arriving at the astral plane earlier...and as he also recalls the Enchantress, he wonders: is his mind truly his own?
Now Cyclops releases the content of his mind, to the deeply trained concentration essential to his being. He becomes one with the reality warping artifact. Physically, his power and Slave Box become as one---unified by his momentum.
.

Cyclops’ shot sends the Box
spinning off into the future.
The wounded Corpse Flower,
after Wolverine escapes her belly,
projects concussive force meant to stall
the pursuing X-Men long enough for him to reach his craft

REMUS SHARPTOOTH (howls)

He is angry she has been destroyed,
and saddened, but he reassures himself

REMUS SHARPTOOTH: She--she is more than a material form.

As though mounted upon a pyre, her shrunken body ignites.
Desperately, Sharptooth flies into the nexus as though from nowhere.
Colossus peers into the wavelengths attenuating to the future,
and sees a great white wolf form. It seems as though it takes
Sharptooth’s soul on to its next journey.
COLOSSUS: By the ---White Wolf.
Cyclops sees into the future: for how far, he cannot say...

CYCLOPS: Jean...I know that’s you...I see your face...your hair...we’ll be together, darling..in the future...

The Vikings, and Jean, too, gaze into the nexus, and glimpse something of the future to come. But the Box itself falls beyond further influence of the present...towards a day hidden by the undiscovered hours which wait to stalk and steal as in the night.

With the ongoing mental storm now relenting...the Phoenix completes the empowering “switch.”
Free by a moment of Emptiness...to know their own feelings, without thought or care an instaneous wave of meditation...peace.
Silence.
The non-existence properties of the flash of the M’Krann Crystal are translated into Bliss...a moment, free of the illusions of existence...a profound moment of potential...as the raw energy of creativity, kindness, and love, in the moment it transforms from ultimate abundance of purity into one expansive, timeless, instant light of the mind, before it is received into Beauty.

Brief epilogue follows.

Epilogue upon the mountainside, emergent:

COLOSSUS: Time ceases its conventional meaning.
NIGHTCRAWLER: What is at stake? An ultimate, long night of captivity for the human mind. Or will the means to know the hearts, minds and imaginations of one another resolve with human survival? The least powerful among us, unable to be ignored by the wealthy---the journey we seem at times to walk, alone, the need to search after similarities/
COLOSSUS: Should these things be torn from the embrace of our experience, at the spell of the wolf? Lasting liberty---or a peaceful, exotic future deferred---will a bright day of justice emerge?
How else might these false barrier fall?


WOLVERINE: You three have a full-on scent now. The Wolf Man’s scent began vanishing after his split from you.
RAY (in Old Norse):
RAY :
Då vi er levande igen, för den förste gång i busund ár *

*Then we are living again, for the first time in a thousand years.

NICOLA: You! Gospodin, do you understand now my language?
COLOSSUS: Da, Before, I could not, but now you are speaking some early form of Russian. I am not well versed in these things.
XAVIER: Perhaps you will find English useful in the modern world. It would be a simple process to convey your understanding into translation.

MARC: Extraordinary! Yet of all strange powers, I sense no magic in you people.
RAY: It is as I said: they are like animals who derive new traits than the parents, such as I have observed.
NICOLA: Perhaps our fate remains linked to the future re-appearance of the Box. If so, what is free will?
MARC: Perhaps, my brother, that is what we must now discover. As it stands, this world has been subtly changed in our wake.

NICOLA: Abril my love, I never expected to breath the air again...nor hold you so.
RAY: Huh. I’d still prefer to know how it happened!
MARC: (Abril) For now, I’d content myself to pick up anew...in the land where Mycearyns once stood true.
CYCLOPS: You’re welcome to come as far as Muir Island with us, friends.

STORM(thoughts): Jean brings back all the “inadvertent cosmic suicides” with her powers, we see how powerful she is but also we’re left with the individuals who’ve never experienced the broader universe that way with their imaginations...how will they all react?

CYCLOPS: And what of you, Machine Man? If you’re unlike any before you, surely you are some mutation in the truest sense?

MACHINE MAN (sitting cross legged, spot-welding himself): Possibly, with the environmental damages done, all of humankind will have to mutate some way to survive. I’m model x-51, so I was a born X-Man, except mutants have parents. Let’s just say, my birth certificate would make a run for President kinda tricky!

Jean touches Ororo on the arm, and without a word they step over from the rest, overlooking the savaged, proud wilderness, and the aching of the now-stilled seas hinted on the wind.

JEAN: (pacing) When I looked into the clairvoyant future flux, I realized the days flow by so quickly in the scheme of things. Their brevity terrifies me, these days to come, so filled with unbridled passions beyond imagining. And yet---is the future ever meant only to be briefly seen, to keep us beside the unknown in the moment? (She gives a little laugh, and turns to smile.) Is that why I can hardly hope to make another to understand?

ORORO: Then, if you cannot understand the flicker of the future you saw: what did you feel?
JEAN: An expansiveness...a song, composed of inspirations beyond this mode of existence...and finally, darkness...and a feeling...just ineffable...the true unknown, I guess...for now.
Is mankind not meant to live with such perceptions, but with those set in the moment? On such a thin sliver of time and space—here, can a thing like love take place?

ORORO: I saw a vision of Cairo...Tahrir Square, a place I haven’t seen since my parents died. I see such joy, the opposite of the great sadness of those days of bombs and fear and entrapment. I see no one alone, and people in need realizing each creature here is in this together. To this, we must answer, or else.
What is a day? What are thirty years? Even should we know the future, we must understand.
And as for love...all I can think now, sister, to say to you is this.

My birthday present from Charles was the first I could remember, Jean. He suggested memorization was a useful practice, and nothing suited the soul like poetry. Within the words I read that night, I found something Maya Angelou wrote which I committed to memory:
“Yet, if we are bold love strikes away the chains of fear from our souls.
In the flush of love’s light, we dare be brave
And suddenly we see that love costs all we are
And will ever be.
Yet, it is only love, which sets us free.
(They hug.)
JEAN: Thanks for letting me unload these things, Storm. I wonder how best to perceive this transmetamorphosis.
A vision of what might become...a secret revealed:
Within the universal mind, ultimate hope to follow the purpose of all our days to the End.

Thank you. Its place in the greatest thing ever written, I'll never know, but it’s about the greatest things I could ever imagine. Cecil L. Disharoon, Jr.

*(Ray's using a corruption of Swedish and Icelandic intended to serve. Thanks Beachy.)

Thanks to Jason Powell. When I asked about a less-explored realm of central X-mythology, Jason suggested

D'Ken (if not Deathstrike, who has cool combat powers), the M'Krann Crystal, even Mr. Sinister. All three

emerged with ready-made alliances with story concepts in my template. This helped "Marvelize" the science-

fiction processes and conflicts, and worked well in both the Defenders story for which I asked it and the

eventual X-Men version that begged to be told. C Lue

Lue, this story makes my brain hurt ... !

It's a real challenge to keep up with everyone without George Perez on hand. Sorry?

I do hope it will come with a rewarding good side soon after. Like ice cream brain freeze.

I'm going to have to re-read it. You're too smart for me, bud !

As long as it seems to say something that might be worthwhile, take your time---and thanks for giving it a chance.
You teased a lot of subtleties out of the X-Men stuff you've read that made me feel like I missed half the show first time around!

The extra time I took to accumulate more incidence for each character may have made the whole less accessible. It's a pretty breath-taking scenario---I had to wait patiently for the details to emerge and assemble chronologically, as the plot seemed to dictate less individual actions at first.
The science I added took the most time. I hope I find a balance between challenging and baffling that keeps it fun for the reader!

The idea that a puzzle will bring you closer to understanding the internal life or even friendship of another part of the world or another place in time is always intriguing---even if it goes awry in the process!

---Lue, @ Lue

It's very dense, and there is a lot to absorb. I definitely would be keen to see it illustrated, though!

Me, too!!! If it gets any illos, I'll post'em in. I'd dearly love to see someone with Sal Buscema-level gifts for breaking it down convert this into forty jam packed pages!

I sorta wrote it like my life depended on it. And I didn't want any fan of any character short-changed, either. I hope it's a good Desert Island reading story. If my life ends tomorrow, I gave my X-Men tale everything I've got!

My friend Sabrina sent me this today:

"Don't think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It's self-conscious, and anything self-conscious
is lousy. You can't try to do things. You simply must do things."---Ray Bradbury

Ha, I like your tweak of this thread's name.

It almost feels like "If James Joyce" wrote the X-Men. Which is appropriate, since Banshee was a big fan of James Joyce. (As was Claremont ... as was a member of Freedom Force, as I recall ...)

Can I ask, other than the X-Men and Machine Man, are any of the characters from other Marvel comics? One thing I was wondering as I was reading was whether I was maybe missing some references.

They're all originals, Doot---natives to my novel. While this doesn't have the level of set up as the three Defenders stories, hopefully the original characters stand on their own actions & explanations. I'm apprehensive about borrowing any exposition from their appearances in the other stories, but I would if it were necessary for clarity. (Those Vikings are also used in the Avengers and FF stories posted here.) Hope the X-Men as portrayed here are very true to Claremont's characters. If only I knew what Roger Stern would say

Bump for reply from the rest.

I KNOW there's a critical thinker out there somewhere. Or at least some emotional response.
I don't mean to give a ready-made excuse, but of course some of us can only hit IMWAN for
a few scattered minutes at a time (and this may be the nature of the beast). It's not a critical forum, per se.
Were that I knew where to take it.
Don't be too proud to say it kicks ass! Or take what you don't like and make it better in
your own work. If it was you trying to make something ridiculous or sublime,
wouldn't you appreciate it? I encourage people to take chances, be creative.