Illyana Rasputinya tumbled to an abrupt halt, her head spinning, her demonic armor in full effect. Five seconds ago, she'd been on a deserted island in the South Pacific with the rest of the X-Men, making a desperate and probably losing last stand against the biggest army of Sentinels and random paramilitary wackos she'd ever seen. Then Magneto had shown up and tried to help them, and then (pardon the expression) all Hell had broken loose.

When the sky went orange and the bottom dropped out of reality, Illyana had summoned a stepping disc to take her away, knowing that something had gone terribly wrong... but her control was unpredictable, and sometimes in the past she'd thrown herself, or her teammates, through time and space. She looked around and shook her head, disgusted with herself - wherever she was, it was certainly NOT the front lawn of Xavier's in New York, and she hadn't managed to bring a single one of her teammates with her.

So... where -was- she, if not where she'd wanted to go?

This place felt like Limbo, the way station through which her teleports always took her, the sorcerous realm she ruled absolutely, but...

She gasped, and her Soulsword snapped into her hand. As far as the eye could see, the landscape was covered in machinery. Gleaming airships crossed the clear blue skies; the roads were busy with fantastic vehicles. The air was sweet, with a faint hint of coal and a tang of metallic steam.

She slammed the Soulsword point-down into the grass she'd landed in, summoning a familiar incantation to mind. She was displaced - in time, if not in space - and this had to be a future Limbo, one where someone had wrested control from her during her long absence. Perhaps S'ym, her demonic servitor, or his crony N'astirh; perhaps even the Technarch Magus, although this scene seemed too natural to be the doing of the transmoding horror she and the New Mutants had defeated years before.

No matter. She was the Mistress of Limbo; she'd prevailed against S'ym and a dozen like him, and she would again. The first step was the spell to regain physical control of the realm...

9:37 AM
Himemiya Botanical Garden
Tenjou Academy, Nihonia, Cephiro

Anthy Tenjou looked up from the rosebush she was pruning and cocked an ear to the wind; sighing, she pushed herself to her feet and clucked.

"Never a dull moment," she told the rosebush before raising both hands, enveloping herself in a violet glow, and flashing out of existence.

The others would follow her, she knew; Utena wouldn't want her in danger without backup, and Corwin was touchingly loyal to both of them. She figured she'd be done by the time they got there, though.

9:47 AM
Zantoku, Autozam, Cephiro

Corwin Ravenhair, Nall Silverclaw, and Utena Tenjou crashed through the window of the First Provincial Bank of Autozam and into the thick of a sorcerous duel that had already done considerable damage to a number of buildings on Broadway, to say nothing of the street itself. With her usual lack of hesitation, Utena drew the Thorn of the Rose and dove into the fray. Corwin held back for a moment and surveyed the chaos; so too did Nall, who rode on his shoulder.

Anthy seemed to be holding her own, and then some, against a stranger with blonde hair, a full suit of some sort of mystical armor, and a definite Anton LaVey fetish, judging by the faux-Satanic motifs in both that armor and the large magical blade she was wielding. The horns, goat legs, and tail only added to the effect; Corwin was fairly sure he'd've snarfed up his drink, if he'd had one, just looking at the ridiculous display.

On the other hand, the stranger was a competent swordsman, and Anthy's own skill with her draconic warstaff was holding her back but not really stopping her. The half-svartelven sorceress seemed to have the edge where actual spellcasting was concerned, though, and the balanced disparities meant that, for the moment, the combatants were at a kind of impasse.

The duel raged on until Utena's blade came down with a resounding crash against the stranger's own. The Prince of Cephiro's rose-tinted battle aura crackled and spat as she halted her lunge, then turned to face the intruder.

"What in the hell do you think you're doing?!" Utena said, the full force of her stature as Prince sheathing her voice in steel.

The stranger fell back for a moment, giving Corwin and Nall a chance to jog up to the scene of the battle.

"I could have parried that myself, dear," Anthy said in a mild voice.

"Never mind that right now," Utena said, glaring at the blonde. "Do you mind telling me what you're doing wrecking my WORLD here?"

"Your world?!" the stranger snarled. "This is Limbo! My will reigns supreme here!"

The Trinity of Cephiro exchanged politely baffled looks.

"...your will to trash the entire place?" Corwin said mildly, ruffling his hair with one hand. "There's about twenty million rektars in damage here," he added, gesturing to the ruined shops and shattered street. "It's going to take a couple weeks to clean up, even if I nice the job up to... "

He noticed that he seemed to be losing his audience, shook his head, and said, "Well, never mind. The important thing is that I dunno where you think you are, but the place you're in is called Cephiro, and if there's any will that reigns supreme here... " He shrugged with a self-deprecating smile. "I'm afraid it's kind of... mine. So. Who are you and what are you doing here?"

The stranger stared at him in uncomprehending disbelief for a moment; then her face darkened and she snarled, "Changing the place's name won't save you, usurper."

So saying, she raised her sword again; her helm closed over her face as though it were part of her skin. Her battle aura began to flare. Utena raised her sword...

... and the entire business was rendered quite moot as Nall Silverclaw opened his mouth and hosed the blonde sorceress down with a blast of freezing ice that pinioned her hands to her body and her body to the ground, knocking her unconscious in the process.

"Chick's got a worse attitude than Umi," he remarked. "I think we're gonna have to call an expert."

"On what?" Corwin inquired wryly. "Girls who think they're Aleister Crowley?"

There was a pause, and then Cephiro's Trinity shared one of those looks.

"Hellboy," they said in unison.

5:17 PM
Mignola Point, New Avalon, Zeta Cygni

Illyana came to slowly, only to find herself fundamentally unhurt, a little groggy, and somewhat chilly. She was sitting in a sort of ragged seiza on a plain stone floor; she pulled herself to her (back to regular human) feet, dusted off the long cobalt velvet broomstick skirt she was wearing, arranged her dark silk blouse a little more decorously, and looked around.

It was a sorcerer's sanctum, almost certainly; if the rows of grimoires and scrolls on the tall bookshelves hadn't tipped her off, the chalked pentacle with neat Solomonic symbols on the floor that was doing a more-than-adequate job of keeping her put and powerless would have told her that. She tried to summon a stepping disc and failed; her thoughts were still a little jumbled, and she was still inexplicably cold.

"Hello?" she called out tentatively.

No one answered for a moment; then, suddenly, a shape she'd thought was a statue moved at the far end of one of the long workbenches that dotted the room. She stifled a gasp; aside from the fact that it was brick-red, with peculiar flat spots on its head where its horns belonged, the demon was nearly a dead ringer for S'ym, her brutal and treacherous lieutenant in Limbo. She hissed and threw up a hand in warding, only to have the instinctive invocation fail.

The burly demon came to stand just outside the pentacle; it took care to keep the lines of chalk undisturbed. It eyed her warily, then produced an amazingly humanlike smile.

"Hiya, kid," it rumbled. "Feeling any better? Sorry about the accomodations."

Illyana blinked. "I..." she began. "It's cold. Or I'm cold."

"Oh!" the demon said, slapping its head with one giant hand; the other, Illyana noticed, appeared to be made of animate stone. "Stupid of me. Sorry about that."

Up close, she could see that it wasn't really as much like S'ym as she'd thought it was; for one thing, it was wearing a rather dapper trenchcoat, with a shoulder patch featuring the emblem of a fist closed about the grip of a sword and the letters "IPO BPRD". She'd never known S'ym to carry a gun, either, or wear cargo shorts.

"It's all right," Illyana said hastily. "I've been through much worse cold than this before."

The demon eyed her. "So an Alfheim Cat Dragon throwing an iceberg up around you isn't all that chilly," it said in a disturbing sort of deadpan. "Mm-hm, I'd better add that to my notes. Name's Hellboy, by the way," it added. "You?"

"Magik," Illyana said.

Hellboy snorted. "Spelled with a 'k', I bet," he said, and Illyana found herself reddening slightly and not wanting to make eye contact. "Name like that, get-up like you had going back in Cephiro, I can see why Corwin had a hard time takin' you too seriously," he replied. "No, seriously, what's your real name?"

"Illyana Nikolayevna Rasputinya," the young sorceress said, suddenly a little ashamed of her actions back in... Cephiro, they'd called it. Her naturally snarky personality overrode that, though, as she added pointedly, "While we're being judgmental, what kind of a name is 'Hellboy'?"

Hellboy regarded her skeptically. "Like I'm gonna tell a chick who thinks she's a demon sorceress my NAME name?" he said. "Right." Then he quirked one of his horn stumps - they seemed to work a bit like eyebrows - and exhaled suddenly. "Hang on. Rasputinya?" he said. "Like, uh... Piotr Rasputin?"

<<My brother!>> Illyana exclaimed, lapsing into Russian. <<Where is he? Do you know him?>>

<<Of course I know him, Little Snowflake,>> Hellboy replied, his Russian accentless and perfect. He switched back into Standard and added, "Pete draws my comic book. Talks about you all the time. Lemme talk to the Chief for a second..."

Illyana had been through a good many surreal experiences in her life, starting with being abducted by a demon wizard as a small child and raised as a sort of prisoner princess in a low-budget community theatre version of Hell. This had left her somewhat more inured to Weird Shit than even your average X-Man.

It might actually have been these high standards that left her feeling slightly uneasy with the choice of location for her meeting with the chief of the galactic police, or whoever she was supposed to be meeting. It offended her sensibilites on some level for such an encounter to happen at a food truck parked in front of an office building. That all seemed too... normal.

To be fair, the city which contained that office building made up somewhat for that, since it was quite the most stupendous urban area Illyana had ever seen. Hellboy had explained that the year was 2407 and that they were in outer space, which had led her to expect some sort of antiseptic chrome future utopia. What she found instead was more like a 20th-century American city turned up to 11, apart from the aliens. Somehow its very familiarity made the scale that much more spectacular. Illyana didn't impress easily, but by the time they arrived at the truck (denoted by a colorful banner reading "TOMODOG" in large, friendly letters), New Avalon had accomplished that job.

Then the burly man standing third in line at Tomodog turned around and saw her approaching, and she forgot about all that and just hugged her brother.

A few paces away, having already acquired their dogs, two men who could have been brothers themselves stood and watched the reunion with nearly identical little smiles.

"Well," said Gryphon thoughtfully, "she doesn't look too dangerous." He gave a wry smile. "I assume that means she's an immanent eschaton in human form."

Don Griffin nodded sagely. "Pretty much, yeah."

"Forgive me if I'm profiling, but that appears to be something of a theme with your people."

Don shrugged. "They say every generation has its specialty. Anyway, she's not bad, she's just drawn that way. She's good people as long as she's got adult supervision, and by 'adult' I mean 'Elder Sign-capable'."

Gryphon nodded. "Fair enough." They stood watching the joyous reunion for a bit longer, munching their dogs.

"We'll just give them a while, then, shall we," said Gryphon at length.

"Let's," agreed Don.

"Late Arrival" - a Lost and Found Mini-Story by Janice Collier
with Benjamin D. Hutchins
special to the Eyrie Productions Discussion Forum
©2012 Eyrie Productions, Unlimited