X-Men Evolution: Rogue Evolution

D&D is for Nerds 4.6

The minutes following the alert were nothing short of kayos. Evan took off running in the direction of his room while Anna heard doors fly open behind her. When she turned, she spotted Scott and Jean bolting down the stairs, leaving Jean's door ajar behind them. There was a clatter from Evan's room and a fraction of a second later he popped back out with something long and black balled up tightly in his fist as he joined the others.

At a loss for what to do, she chased after him till he found the small elevator in the hall near the kitchen where Scott and Jean were waiting inside, holding the door open. When Evan slipped inside, Anna made to follow in after him when a hand caught her shoulder.

"Not you." When she looked up, she saw Scott looking down at her.

She slapped his hand away. "The hell you mean, 'not me?'"

"You haven't been cleared for missions yet. It's too dangerous."

Jean nudged him to one side. "It's true, Anna. Xavier didn't mention you getting the 'okay' to do missions yet. Go meet up with him in the Cerebro room."

Before Anna had the chance to argue, the elevator door slammed in her face - just grazing the tip of her nose - and heard the sound of heavy gears engaging just beyond the thin metal. She kicked the base of the elevator door, then pulled out her phone to see if anyone had reached out to her. Sure enough, she had a message from the 'man' himself.

'Anna,

Meet me downstairs at Cerebro. You will not be joining the others on this mission. I repeat, you DO NOT have clearance to join the others at this time.

-Xavier'

Anna blew out a sudden gust of hot air that dislodged the white bangs sticking to her forehead. It's not that she even particularly wanted to go do any kind of 'mission,' but just the fact so many people were telling her no made her want to fly the damn jet herself. Phone still in hand, she punched the 'down' button with her knuckle, leaned up against the metal door-jam, and drummed her fingers on her hip. After a short while, those drumming fingers eventually formed into a fist that drove into the center of the right door's cold surface. When she pulled her hand back, she saw the door was annoyingly unparsed while her hand stung so thoroughly she could feel each individual bone inside. A second later, the door flew open to an empty car.

Stepping inside the unmoved air, she could clearly smell Scott's crappy cheap cologne he always seemed to wear, and Jean's overpriced flowery body spray. Soaking in the fumes, she punched in the requested level to the small bank of buttons, waited for the car to stop, and when they next opened she found the downstairs pulsing an anxiety ensuing red light. Despite the lack of any audible klaxon or alarm, the red light-soaked corridors made the downstairs a whole new world to navigate. The shadows felt different, the signs were harder to read, and despite her apparent lack of need to rush, she ran for the room she was reasonably sure was where Cerebro was kept.

When she reached the last door in one of the branching hallways, and - sweeping her watched hand over a panel to the right of the door - the door snapped open and revealed a room whose size rivaled the Danger Room, but was easily twice as alien looking. The walls seemed to be comprised of one solid mass of rounded smooth metal to shape a perfect sphere, and before her stretched a long narrow walkway fed into a large platform near the center of the room. Dangling above the platform was a tangled beast of wires and blinking lights held in place by strategically placed struts extending from the upper hemisphere of the room. From a distance, it looked like a car with jet-black sinew levitating in mid-air. Just below, sat before a bank of monitors, was Xavier. He wore a chrome helmet that spilled over with funky-looking tubes and delicate-looking cables. He turned to look at her, the many wires stuck to his helmet sifting and moving along with his body.