X-Men Evolution: Rogue Evolution

Discovery 1.5

Images flashed before Anna's eyes too quickly for her mind to follow, but she felt as if a stabbing mantle laced with pure anguish, anger, and frustration had been laid upon her shoulders. She saw bright orange nonsensical symbols, flashes of bright lights, massive artillery guns, pools of blood, tubes, the pale face of a woman, and the scowl of a grizzly-looking man with long crooked yellow teeth.

Eventually, she found herself in a massive room unlike she had ever seen before. The walls, instead of being made out of drywall or plaster, were made out of glistening, seamless metal. They all gathered in a sphere around her, while she sat on a platform suspended in the middle. To her right was a bank of monitors and just beyond them was what appeared to be a computer the size of a car. A man of unremarkable shape and size sat before the monitors. He shed something like a helmet fitted with tubes and electrodes revealing a bald head. He placed the helmet on a mount and turned around to face her from his wheelchair.

"I've tracked her down." The man said, his tone even-handed and crisp. He clicked a button on a keyboard and a map appeared on one of the monitors. "She's just left Caldecott County and has stopped at the discount suites off of route twenty."

"Great." She heard herself boom in Logan's voice. "They went East. Couldn't have gone a little North, say - out of hillbilly country?"

"It would seem not." The bald man clicked a couple of more buttons on the wide black keyboard. "You remember the briefing?"

"Yeah. Powers of absorption through skin-to-skin contact. She can take memories and replicate abilities, or in our case, powers temporally."

"There's been more developments. This one is far from standard. Mystique has a hold of her."

Anna felt the corners of her eyes tighten. "How the hell is that?" She pointed Logan's beefy arm at the computer. "Isn't this giant gizmo supposed to give us the edge?"

"In this particular case, we were a few years too late. The girl is Mystique's adopted daughter."

"What? That thing has it in her to raise a kid?"

"It was a surprising development to me as well. I was aware that Destiny was involved -"

"The Brotherhood's soothsayer?"

"I suppose you could call her that." An image of Irene appeared where the map was, but in the photo, she was younger. Her hair was longer and she stood a little taller. It appeared the photo had been cropped out from some larger image. "She's still acting as their primary mutant locater."

"No wonder they'd kill to get Cerebro. Leaving all that up to some crack-pot -"

"I wouldn't discount the woman's ability, Logan. Her predictions are never wrong. They just may not always line up with our current timeline."

"Whatever. I'm not worried about the old blind woman."

"You should be." The man straightened up in his chair. "Between her and Mystique, I worry how close you'll be able to get. Especially considering they are her adoptive mothers. And even if you manage to reach her, I wonder if she will even want to hear what you have to say."

"Want me to bag her then?

The man blinked. "What?"

Anna watched her hands raise. "I'm kidding, Charles." She leaned back in her chair, stared at the monitors, and stroked her rough chin. "Though I honestly don't know how else we would be able to do this."

"We will do it like we've done it every other time. Level with her. Tell her what's going on. Give her a choice. We may normally get the jump on fledgling mutants but we don't get that edge this time. The approach doesn't change... we just need to be smarter about it."