A FEW NOTES FROM THE AUTHOR OK, so. The year was 1986. I was in the seventh grade at the Middle School in Millinocket, Maine - an institution which has since closed its doors, which is a rather odd feeling, by the way. Like many a twelve-year-old posessed of a high-flying imagination, I liked comic books, especially super-hero books; but I was starting to take on that obnoxious veneer of sophistication so common to boys in their early teens, and as such I was beginning to feel dissatisfied with most of the titles I was reading. They didn't seem -adult- enough for my changing tastes - not in terms of titillation, but in terms of development, in characters and in the stories themselves. Too many hero books, then as now, suffered from the "Star Trek: Voyager" effect: the requirement that, whatever wild and crazy things happened in the middle of any given issue, the status quo had to be restored by the final page, and never mind whether the events from the middle had any potential for interesting long-term repercussions. That was getting on my nerves. A friend of mine at school and I were discussing this lamentable state of affairs one lunchtime, in between recaps of the previous afternoon's episode of "Voltron: Defender of the Universe". (Hey, what do you want, we were -twelve-.) With that awe-inspiring wisdom of the Slightly Older Kid, my friend reached into his bag, pulled out a comic, and told me, "Try this." I can't remember which issue it was - I imagine there's a database out there on the Web someplace that could narrow it down for me, but really, I think I'd rather leave it as a piece of lost history - but it was an issue, anyway, of "The Uncanny X-Men". Now, for those of you who joined us late, let me clue you to an essential fact of the universe: in about 1991, Marvel Comics went, editorially and creatively, utterly and completely insane. They've never really recovered. This is why, for approximately the last twelve years, figuring out what the hell they're trying to do has been harder than wrestling a Congressman for dibs on the last intern. Which means that, in 1986, UXM was printed in that lousy-looking dot-tone color scheme, sure, but it was COMPREHENSIBLY WRITTEN! Latter-day X-Fen may find that hard to believe, but it's true! See, there was only the ONE TITLE, so the continuity MADE SENSE, and could be followed without spending... what would a person have to spend in a month to follow all of the X-Men related titles now? $20? What's more, characters were actually RECOGNIZABLE from one month to the next. Oh, sure, there were changes - and unlike in the other books I was reading and getting frustrated by, they'd usually stick at the end of the issue and be carried over to later months - but for the most part, they had some logical reason for having happened, and weren't just, "Hmm, we're losing sales to Violent Comics; better up the carnage level some. Can we kill somebody? We can bring them back next time we do a Multi-Series Crossover." ... But I digress. Anyway, it was a cool book, and I dug it immensely. It prompted my second foray into fanfiction (my first having been a couple of 'Transformers' stories the year before). Unlike the TF stories, this series was slightly metafictional - it had an avatar of the author in it, the first such animal I had attempted to create. In those days I was heavily influenced by Victor Applegate II's "Tom Swift, Jr." books, and my character concept reflected that; he hadn't any super-powers, per se, but an inventive genius that allowed him to whip up fantastic pieces of equipment with which to save the day. Those stories were by and large, as you might imagine, terrible; but since they were for no one's consumption but my own, that didn't bother me much. After a year or so of doofing around with that concept, I got tired of it and put it on the shelf. Fast-forward two years, to my freshman year in high school, when I finally made the kind of friends whose houses one goes over to after school instead of going home. I had three of those by Christmastime of that year, one a fellow freshman, the others two years older. They were also comics fans, into the X-Men, and what was more, they liked role-playing games. So I became a Satanist... ... oh, sorry... wrong rant. Um, anyway, we started playing various games, and eventually we got around to playing the "Marvel Super Heroes" RPG. The system was clumsy, but it was fun anyway, and we played it a lot that summer, in between sessions of AD&D, Palladium's "Ninjas and Superspies", and what became our standby game, FASA's "MechWarrior" (the RPG extension of the classic hex-map wargame, "Battletech"). One day, in a fit of silliness, we made ourselves up as Marvel Super Heroes characters, and set the adventure in our sleepy 7,000-person hometown in north-central Maine. Our hook to the "established" super-hero scene in the Marvel Universe was that my character was, per my old SI fanfics, enrolled at Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters, and had come back home to Millinocket for summer break to find his friends (why they were my friends in that universe, since I never went to Stearns High where the real me met them, is a question best left to the philosophers) had developed super-powers of their own. Sure, it's a lame concept, but no lamer than some of the things Marvel have sold for $2.50 a pop for the last few years. :) Anyway, we were - brace yourselves - the Guardians of Vacationland (that's what it says on Maine's license plates, "Vacationland", even though Maine is the Pine State), intrepid defenders of northern New England and Atlantic Canada from the nefarious villainy of... well, whatever villains deigned to threaten our turf. Since it was our game, an unnerving number of villains did just that, and we fought them off, in between Classic Marvel Inter-Hero Misunderstandings leading to battles with the Avengers or Alpha Flight. My avatar - the very first fictional me - went through some changes as this campaign evolved. For one thing, due to an act of extreme Gamemaster Perversity, we all got what modern Marvel Zombies will recognize as the classic New Writing Team Takes Over Book, Abitrarily Redesigns Characters "second origins". In this, our GM (who was not me) anticipated the prevailing editorial policies of 1990s Marvel itself by several years. My character became, due to an extremely ill-explained accident involving time travel, a Time Lord. (Yes, like in "Doctor Who".) Second, he acquired a suit of heavily armed power armor, modeled after the GRF-1N "Griffin" BattleMech in the original "BattleTech" set (for you old-time anime fans, that looks the same as the Soltic Roundfacer from "Dougram", and is not to be found in the most current versions of "BattleTech", as FASA's licenses for the likenesses of all those old anime mecha they used in the original game have expired). This was given to him on the principle that, being good with tools and a pal of Doctor Doom's (don't ask how that happened), he would naturally build such a thing to keep from getting killed in super-powered punch-ups. This was a guy who was, at the time, running with the likes of the Rachel Summers Phoenix; a trenchcoat that could make him invisible and a sonic screwdriver were not going to cut it. :) Third, inspired by the example of H.P. Lovecraft, who put himself in some of his stories but changed his name in an attempt to make it less obvious, I changed his name. Based on the name of the 'Mech his armor resembled and my middle name, he became Donald Griffin. (This name has turned up as an alias for my "Undocumented Features" self a couple of times, if you're sharp-eyed enough to spot it.) So the pattern was established for my high-school years; every fall Don would "go back to school" and the Marvel campaign would be shelved, to return whenever he "came back to Millinocket" on a school holiday; so we played a lot of Marvel at Christmastime and in the summer. My adventure journals became the second series of Marvel-self adventures. They were better than the first ones, but still pretty bad. (By the way, the reason that I and my post-college fic avatars are called "Gryphon" instead of "Griffin" is easy to explain: WPI already had a Professor Peter Griffin using the username "griffin", and, since I was holding up the line, I didn't take too much time figuring out a second choice; I just used a different spelling, and it's stuck since then.) Then I went to college, and over the next couple of years, my friends and I lost touch with each other and drifted apart. I haven't seen any of them in a few years now. Marvel Comics underwent a bizarre creative and editorial disintegration about the time I hit college, X-Men became fashionable, titles proliferated, quality plummeted (or, to be perhaps fairer about it, became extremely uneven; the latter days have given us a few things I'm rather fond of, in between the incomprehensible wanderings), I drifted away and rediscovered DC's cleaner, purer, more-respectful-of-their-history heroics (like James Robinson's "Starman"). The Marvel campaign has been dead for a decade. Dead, but not totally forgotten; my Marvel self has been mentioned a couple of times in my college-and-after anime fanfics, both metafictionally and interdimensionally. My "Undocumented Features" self created his own suit of Griffin armor based on the notes and journals from that RPG campaign, which, having lived my life up to the events depicted in UF, he had also played. My "Hopelessly Lost" self has -met- Don, offscreen, and based -his- powersuits on Don's notes and those of Tony Stark/Iron Man. Still, I've occasionally thought, over the years, that it's kind of a shame I couldn't share the very first proto-Eyrie fanfic character and his adventures with the Eyrie readership. I've lost all the old stories (which is probably just as well), but the character remained alive in my mind - which is ironic, since in our last Marvel Super Heroes session he was "apparently killed" in the mighty Marvel manner, almost as though we knew we weren't going to play again. I kicked a few ideas around for bringing him back, every now and again, but years passed, I fell further and further behind the curve of just what Marvel was -doing- to Don's old surrounding cast, and I never quite had the heart to tackle the project. Besides, the political climate of fandom has changed, and SI works are unfashionable nowadays. After spending what felt like about half of my life trying to explain to people that "Neon Exodus Evangelion" wasn't one, I didn't really feel like launching another project that -was-. Then the X-Men movie came out, I gritted my teeth and went to it, and to my absolute astonishment (considering both Marvel's movie record for the last decade or so -and- the fact that their -comics- haven't been any great shakes for a while either), IT DIDN'T SUCK! In fact, I quite liked it. And it got me thinking... why not bring Don out for a spin? I miss him and his friends. I miss the way the Marvel Universe used to be when Don was a living, breathing RPG/fic character. But I had and have no intention of launching -another- fanfic universe now; if I do start another someday, it'll be after one of the current ones has finished. I'm already doing too much; starting another series would be foolhardy. Besides, trying to do fanfic based on an ongoing comic series is all but impossible - the canon changes faster than fanfic can keep up, and there are bound to be places where one's opinion of what ought to have happened, or what -would- have happened with the presence of more or other characters, diverges the fic from the canon irretrievably anyway. And besides, given the way Marvel's been run the last few years, I wouldn't -want- to try and keep up with the canon. So, bearing that in mind, I had to establish certain conceits and parameters before I could green-light a Marvel project in my mind. Here, for your background-context-establishing pleasure, they are: - This story takes place in a rather vague analog to the Marvel Universe circa issues dated May 1998. (There are events in it, for example, which can be dated to the -same day-, in-story, as Excalibur #120, and the day after "Uncanny X-Men" #355.) I say "rather vague" because: - I didn't regularly read any Marvel book except "Iron Man" in the years between 1992 and the present, with the exception of issues dated May 1998 (the month when I last poked my head in to see what they were up to now). Before that I have only vague memories of having picked up various X-books in comic shops while browsing, thinking either "huh?!" or "eurgh!", and moving on. So, nothing that happened between, say, the founding of Excalibur and Operation Zero Tolerance can be definitely assumed to have happened. That includes Professor X wiping Magneto's mind, turning into a super-villain, and mysteriously teleporting the Avengers and the Fantastic Four into a bizarre parallel universe produced by Image Comics. NONE OF THAT HAPPENED IN THE BACKGROUND OF THIS STORY. (I'm willing to consider the notion of any brain surgery which will prevent me from knowing that it happened in the background of ANY story. :) You have been warned. - Ditto for that weird thing about the 30th-century warrior cult that had the ghost of Rachel Summers as its high priestess, or whatever the hell that was supposed to be. I've wanted to set fire to the guy who came up with Cable for the last eight years and I'm not about to change my opinion based on -this- sorry state of affairs. (Having read the Zero Tolerance trade paperback, I actually don't hate Cable any more, which startled me almost as much as the X-Men movie having been good. I won't say I've forgiven him for ruining the New Mutants, but I can stand to see him in stuff now. But his origin still pisses me off, so I'm ignoring it. :) - Oh, and what the hell was that thing with Wolverine having his adamantium bone plating torn out and his claws turning out not, after all, to have been bionic (as shown as in that lovely cut-away diagram in "The Official Handbook to the Marvel Universe")? I don't THINK so. Classic Formula Wolverine is in effect here. There will be no debate about this. - You may notice that Character X (no pun intended) is missing or Character Y doesn't seem to have had Weird Thing From Whenever happen to him/her. That may be because I missed it or it may be because I don't like it. Either way, chances are it wasn't an accidental oversight. - Time works weirdly in the Marvel Universe. Take the example of Kitty Pryde/Shadowcat. She was introduced in 1980 at the age of 13, turned 16 in an issue of Excalibur that hit the stands sometime in the mid-nineties, and now seems to be somewhere between eighteen and twenty; but she's had twenty years' worth of adventures in between. For this reason, time spans in this story aren't going to map correctly to the Marvel chronology, but rather to Don's life as an avatar of me. So, he first went to Xavier's in the fall of 1986 (eighth grade) at the age of 13; got separated from the X-Men and wound up with the rest of the left-behind X-Men in Excalibur circa 1989 (age 16); and disappeared into the Time Vortex during the Excalibur Cross-Time Caper, circa 1991 (18). Based on nothing more sophisticated than a wild-ass guess based on how old Kitty seems to be in Excalibur #120 (her age having been the closest to Don's), I'm saying it's about three years later in this piece, or around the spring of 1994. (Weird how many of my stories are set in 1994... ) - I've taken the liberty of hindsight and knowledge of some of the BBC's plans for the never-produced 28th season of "Doctor Who" to clean up Don's "second origin" a bit. (In Season 28, according to some sources, it was going to be revealed that one does not have to be Gallifreyan to become a Time Lord; this eliminates the need for the complex and bizarre hand-wave that our GM came up with at the time to explain how Don could have been one.) - This is the only story I will ever set in a modified Marvel Universe. It's called "Eyrie Productions Destroys the Marvel Universe" for a reason, besides the Sergio Aragones/Fred Hembeck joke. No fooling - this is -it-. (I've even taken the liberty of having a swipe at the latter-day Marvel editorial style in the process of setting up the aforementioned destruction. :) - Most of what has gone before is explained by way of that old "Doctor Who" writer's trick, exposition to an uninformed character, so I won't bother trotting it out here; the rest of it can be glarked from context, I hope. - And, lastly, I needed to do this foreword in hopes of explaining what this project is and isn't supposed to be, where this character sprang from, and why I felt motivated now, of all times, to run him up the flagpole and see who salutes. If you're not an X-Fan past or present, or you hate SI fic, or you hate -me-, or you're not particularly interested in the prehistory of Eyrie Productions, save yourself some discomfort (and me some trouble) and don't bother reading this, because you won't enjoy it. If you don't make yourself read it anyway, you won't have to write a message telling me what an annoying writer I am and I won't have to read it, so everybody wins. But for the rest of you: Excelsior! (Ah, Stan, we 1980s Marvel Zombies miss you and Shooter... ) --G. 07/30/2K (revised 04/27/2K3) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- The last thing Don Griffin remembered, he was wrestling with a Nazi for control of a submachine gun, and they'd both fallen out the side door of a moving railroad car. That would've been bad enough, but it was made worse by the fact that at the time of the incident, the train was traveling not on the ground, but through the Interstitial Vortex of the space-time continuum. Falling out of one's time machine into the Vortex was widely recognized to be instantly fatal. No one knew that better than Don - he was, after all, a Time Lord. All Time Lords learned early on that nothing real could exist in the Vortex. Matter, energy, anything outside the protective influence of a timeship's dimensional stabilizer would be instantly reduced to bare mathematical potential. Abstractly, Don wondered how it was that he could be remembering his fall. Because he did remember it, vividly. The moment of vertigo as the Nazi officer hurled his weight against the Schmeisser they were fighting for. The brief stab of panic as he realized they were falling. The desperation in Kitty's eyes as she reached for him, both of them knowing she would never reach him. The wrenching sensation as he passed beyond the dimensional stabilization threshold and into the Vortex. He actually watched the Nazi officer, his grip on the Schmeisser lost, tumble off into the blue-white chaos and disintegrate, and felt his own sense of self dissolve into fractal madness... ... And now there was calm and quiet. He had a sense of himself, and of his own body. He opened his eyes. And murmured, "Impossible," as all around him was the flashing, tumbling blue-white seethe of the Vortex. Doubly impossible - he realized as he said it that he was not alone. He turned, and there, impossibly, he saw Rachel. "Ray?" he wondered. "What are you doing here?" "Listen carefully, Don," Rachel replied, "because we don't have much time." "What's going on? The last thing I remember I was - " "Falling out of the train, yeah, I know," replied Rachel. "Technically you don't exist. Neither do I. We're only aware of ourselves and able to communicate because I'm using the Phoenix to make it happen." "What do you mean, -you- don't - " "Don, please, I don't have time to explain. Listen. By my timeframe you've been gone a little more than a year. I've overextended myself, burned myself out. In a little while there's not going to be anything left of me. But with what I have left, I'm going to send you home." "Wait a minute, goddamn it!" said Don. "What you have -left-? What kind of - " "Don!" said Rachel sharply. "I. Don't. Have. Time! I hate to dump it on you this way, but... I'm... well, dead, more or less. What you're talking to is a ghost, a psychic echo. Don't blame yourself. There was nothing you could've done." "When did it happen? I can - " "Not unless you've found some way of defeating the Blinovich Limitation Effect." Don's shoulders sagged. He rubbed at the bridge of his nose with thumb and forefinger. "This is a little hard for me to take," he observed dryly. "I mean, first you tell me I'm -not- dead, then you tell me you -are-... all my expectations are turning out... " He stopped and swallowed, tears rushing into his eyes, as his facade of slightly befuddled detachment cracked, and his voice broke into a sob as he finished, "... wrong." She put a hand on his shoulder, and it felt real, real enough that the sensation momentarily startled him. You couldn't feel anything in the Vortex. That was another of the rules. But then, the Phoenix never cared much for rules, did it? "I can send you back, but only to the corresponding point on my own timeline - when I would be if I hadn't come here myself. I've been searching the Vortex for you for months - when I return you, you'll have been gone almost three years. A lot of things will have changed. I know it'll be hard, but you'll have to get over it, or at least put it aside, and go on. Too much is at stake." Don blinked rapidly, fighting off his tears. "I'll try," he replied hoarsely. "Now listen carefully. This is the important part. Since I've been merged with the timestream, I've learned a couple of things, critical things, that you have to know about - that you have to act on when you get back." "I'm... I'm listening," said Don, fighting to gather in his composure. "I'm listening," he repeated, calmer. She told him the important part. He received it with stunned disbelief. "I... I don't know if I can do that," he whispered, his expression stricken. "You'll find a way. You have to. Something of our world has to survive." Don nodded. "I'll do my best." Downcast, he continued, "I wish there was something I could do for you." Rachel smiled and enfolded him in her arms. "Don't worry," she whispered. "If sending you back home is the last thing I ever do, I'm content with that... and the last spark of me will live on in you." "Oh, God, Ray, I love you," said Don. "I love you, too," Rachel replied. Her lips pressed against his, her fingers pushing into his hair as his arms crossed over her back. Then she was gone, and he was falling, falling, falling... On a rainy spring evening, on a small, windswept coastal island off Scotland, a young American woman named Katherine Pryde - Kitty to her friends - spent the evening unknowingly living out the lyrics to an old song. She had in mind a different song entirely, but that's the way life works sometimes. The song she had in mind was by Dire Straits. This was only natural, for convoluted reasons. She was preoccupied with melancholy thoughts of a lost friend, and as Dire Straits had been one of his favorite bands, they had come to mind; and the song in question was a particularly sad and longing one, so it had been the particular song she thought of. Had she stopped to think about it, it might have struck her as a curious thing. Here she had parted from a man she thought she loved not twelve hours earlier, and parted badly, and though she paced the cobbled streets of the small Scottish isle and thought of loss, was it the loss of him that occupied her mind? No. Since going out for her walk and casting a futile glance at the boat dock where she knew he must have been hours before, she'd hardly thought of Peter Wisdom. Instead, her thoughts were of a friend she'd known - and lost - long before meeting him. The rain poured down, but that didn't bother Kitty; it went right through her as if she weren't there, spattering the ground under her feet. In her ability to let that happen lay the key to understanding all about how she came to be in the present circumstances. Kitty Pryde was no stranger to loss. She'd been recruited at thirteen into a group of people, very special people, whose somewhat paradoxical goal was to save a world that hated and feared them. She had a special power, the gift of a slightly twisted genome, and in her world that sort of thing set a person apart. The comfortable suburban life she'd known to that point had vanished in a sea of chaos, but today she liked to think she was a better person for it. Home had been comfortable, but it had lacked warmth, and the comradeship among Charles Xavier's mutant disciples formed the sorts of bonds that had been sadly lacking in the family Pryde. Over the next - God! Could it have been only eight years? It felt more like twenty - she'd experienced repeatedly the flip side of that comradeship: the pain of losing someone who shared that bond. The struggle to save humanity in spite of itself was a hard one, and occasionally it blossomed into an all-out war, with the attendant casualties. Some had died. Some had changed, become unrecognizable, drifted away. Others had fallen to fates much harder to explain. She had loved them, she missed them all, but in most cases time and the natural resilience of her spirit had muted the pain and made it bearable - part of the fabric of her life rather than tears in it. The one exception was the loss of the one she would, after some thinking she'd never done, have most probably called her best friend, the comrade closest to her own age in some ways and furthest from it in others, the one she'd known the longest and best of any. The pain she felt at his loss was undiminished from the day it had happened, over two years before, not least because she still believed it was largely her fault he was gone. "So here I am again in this mean old town," she murmured to herself, "and you're so far away from me... " She shook her head, irritated with herself, and turned back for the housing complex where she and her compatriots made their home. "Don't be an idiot," she advised herself. "Gone is gone." If Kitty was hoping to make it to her room and continue her funk unnoticed, it was a vain hope; halfway there, she met her friend Kurt Wagner, who, being an old and experienced friend, spotted said funk immediately. He thought he knew what it was about, and though he was wrong, it didn't stop him from trying to help. "Still feeling blue, Katzchen?" he asked. Years of living in English-speaking countries hadn't blunted his German accent, but it was hard telling if the pun had been accidental. Kurt was, after all, something of a clown, and also, coincidentally, blue. "Yeah... I guess so," Kitty allowed, secretly wishing Kurt would go away. She was terribly fond of him and all, but she really didn't want to chat about it right now. He kept pace with her, though, crawling along the ceiling, neatly sidestepping light fixtures. "Is anything wrong... er, aside from the obvious... that I can help with?" She sighed. "I doubt it, Kurt, unless you've got incredible powers over time and space that you haven't told us about." "Nein, I'm sorry," said Wagner seriously. "I guess... " Kitty considered for a moment, then sighed again. "I guess it's just really hit me that he's not coming back." Wagner got a bit ahead of her, turned, and dropped to the floor, his yellow eyes full of sadness. "Katzchen, for all my differences with the man - if I could think of a way to bring Wisdom back to you, I would." Kitty looked quizzical, then faintly annoyed. "I wasn't talking about Peter, actually," she said. Now it was Wagner's turn to look puzzled. "Oh?" "No," said Kitty, and her expression turned back to sadness. "I was talking about Don." Wagner's face fell as she walked through him, and then he turned to follow, going by habit up onto one of the walls in the process. "Ach. Ja. I still think about him, too, almost every day, and Rachel... " "Kurt, I... I don't want to be rude, but I think I need to be alone right now." "Ja, I understand. I'm sorry I intruded... but let me know if you change your mind." She gave him a long look, then mustered the barest of nods, turned, and walked through the closed door of her bedroom. Heaving a sigh, Wagner turned around and went back to the lounge. Jubilation Lee was feeling that curiously piquant mix of emotions that comes only at the end of a good and successful school vacation, and, lacking much of anything else to do at the moment, she was savoring it. Pleasant as life at the Massachusetts campus of Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters was, she'd greatly enjoyed her week's holiday at the senior school in New York. As much as she felt she belonged with the younger class - somebody had to provide the voice of experience for the kids, after all! - there were times when she missed playing in the major leagues, so to speak, and her week at 1407 Graymalkin Lane had been just the ticket for taking the edge off that nostalgia. And they'd even managed to get into a good old-fashioned punch-up with a super-villain, to boot, so she had a pleasant tiredness to add a certain glow to the background of her mood. The only downside was that she'd have to go home, back to Massachusetts, tomorrow - and that in turn had its own upside. It surprised her a little how much she was looking forward to seeing her classmates again. It had only been a week, after all. She lay in the middle of the bed in the room she'd been lent for the week, a front corner room on the third floor of the old mansion. It had once belonged to Don Griffin, who had been part of the second 'graduating class' of X-Men and then in Excalibur, and of whom Logan had spoken with gruff fondness a few times. Don, it was reputed, had been a Lord of Time, which struck Jubilee as a strange sitch to get out of a genetic mutation, but there you are. Jubilee had met him once, when she'd wound up in England after a particularly twisted caper and Don had taken her back to Australia in a funky vehicle that was bigger inside than out, and which he claimed could also travel in time. Shortly after that she'd heard he'd been killed while, coincidentally enough, on an adventure with Excalibur that involved time travel. So the story went, the team had been on a time-traveling train (how 'Back to the Future III') and he'd fallen out a window or something while they were between times. Nasty way to go, she guessed. For whatever reason, the room hadn't been given to another student after Don's departure from the school. It still had his stamp on it, the peculiar echo of a departed tenant. Several of the books on the shelf above the desk were textbooks of some kind, written in languages whose alphabets Jubilee didn't recognize and filled with insanely complicated formulae she thought were some kind of math. There was a curious-looking crystal shard in a stand on the corner of that desk, and hanging in the wardrobe was a double-breasted gray trenchcoat made of a curiously light and slick-feeling material. Posted on the wall in front of the desk was a 1992 Stark International promotional calendar - 12 months of an outdated version of Iron Man. Jubilee had never looked at it closely enough to realize that it was autographed. It was a pleasant room; though it had the echo of another's tenancy, that echo didn't make Jubilee feel as though she were trespassing. She got the impression Don wouldn't mind that she was using his room for her visit to the school. There was something oddly friendly about his resonance in these walls and the odd things he'd left behind. Turning her head to look at the crystal, Jubilee found herself wishing the timing had been better, that she'd had a chance to really know him. Suddenly, the crystal vibrated, rattling softly in its stand, and something gray and misty swirled within it, as though it were hollow and filled with smoke. Jubilee sat up, faced it, and blinked at it. It rattled again, the mist within it darkening. "What the... " she murmured. Movement caught the corner of her eye; she turned to find herself looking at the mirror that covered one of the wardrobe's two door. There was somebody looking back at her from the mirror, but it wasn't a teenaged Chinese-American girl with an unkempt pageboy 'do and a PlayStation T-shirt. It was a white guy a few years older, of shortish height and stocky build, dressed in the somewhat tattered remains of a white dress shirt and rather baggy gray trousers held up with three-point suspenders. He had octagonal, wire-frame spectacles on his face, their lenses cracked and frames dull with tarnish; he had short dark-brown hair that was standing on end and wide, rather stunned blue eyes. A half-second after she registered his image, the man slammed into the back side of the mirror like a bird hitting a window, making a loud THWUD noise and causing the wardrobe to jump slightly. Jubilee recoiled, startled, tumbling off the end of the bed and coming up in a half-crouch ready to fight. She held that pose until she realized that she -recognized- the guy in the mirror, and recognized him as somebody who was unlikely to give her trouble. Besides, what was happening to him was rather fascinating. He was pressed against the back side of the mirror, but instead of his face deforming comically against the glass, the glass deformed against -him-, bulging outward. Something was driving him powerfully against it, and within a couple of creaking seconds he was more than halfway out, the fingers of his reaching hands jutting out like Han Solo's from the carbonite block. His mouth was open in a silent cry, a membrane of mirror stretched across it like plastic wrap, as whatever was driving him pushed harder and harder. Then, with an audible SNAP, Don Griffin popped free, toppled the rest of the way out of the mirror, and crashed to the floor on his face, arms and legs sprawling. Behind him, the gleaming silver surface of the mirror sprang back to its original reflective flatness, rippling slightly and then becoming absolutely still. Cold steam rolled up from Don as he lay motionless on the floor, having very nearly hit his head on the footboard of the bed. Presently he stirred, got a hand under him, and tried to get up. All that accomplished was a kind of feeble rolling-over onto his back. "Hey!" Jubilee knelt next to him, pushing back one somewhat ravelled sleeve and rubbing at his hand and wrist. "You just came back from the dead, big guy, don't go checking out on us now." She leaned down and put an ear against his chest, then recoiled in surprise before leaning slowly back down to listen again, her eyes widening. It sounded as though Griffin had two heartbeats, both pounding like jackhammers in a syncopated rhythm. She was about to get up and go for Logan or somebody when suddenly Griffin moved - more than moved, he leaped up, pulling her up with him, gripping her shoulders in a painful grip and looking down at her with wild blue eyes that she instinctively realized weren't seeing her at all. "Whoa!" she said, holding up her open hands as best she could with him crushing her shoulders. "Ease up, big guy! I'm on your side! Remember me? Jubilee? Friend!" "Where is she?" he asked her, his voice raw with desperation, tears streaming down his face. "Where is she?" "Where's -who-?" Jubilee wondered. "Leggo, you're hurting me." Griffin didn't seem to hear her. He held onto her for a few more seconds, looking around the room in what appeared to be a blind panic. Then his eyes sparked in recognition, and yet they didn't, at the same time - he still had that curious glazed look that told her whatever he was seeing, it wasn't her face. "Oh, thank God!" he cried, and clutched her to him in a bone-crushing hug. "Hey!" Jubilee yelped. "Watch what you're - " But she trailed off into startled silence as he began sobbing on her shoulder, one of his hands covering the back of her head, his fingers pushing through her thick black hair. "Oh, thank God," he repeated in a hoarse whisper, "I thought I'd lost you... I thought you were gone." He stroked the back of her head tenderly, murmuring, "Don't leave me, Ray... I don't know what I'm going to do without you. I don't know what I -can- do... " "Hey, who do you think you're talking to?" Jubilee asked, wriggling free and giving him a shake. "You're having some kind of a dream or something. Wake up!" He stared unseeing at her for a few more moments; then something behind his blue eyes seemed to go "snap", and the eyes focused on her face. "Jubilation?" he murmured, sounding blurry and confused, as if he'd just awakened. "Yeah, that's right," she said. "You awake now?" "I have to - my TARDIS - Rachel," he said, and then collapsed in a heap on the floor next to the bed. This time Jubilee -did- run for Logan. EYRIE PRODUCTIONS, UNLIMITED presents a WAYBACK MACHINE production an UNFINISHED BUSINESS film EYRIE PRODUCTIONS DESTROYS THE MARVEL UNIVERSE starring DON GRIFFIN guest-starring various and sundry MARVEL SUPER HEROES with JUBILATION LEE as herself (c) 2003 Eyrie Productions, Unlimited When Don awoke, it was from a dream of Ray, and as such, he was a little fuzzy, even considering the ordeal he'd just come through. He remembered nothing, at first, except who he was, and that only in the vaguest terms. The first thing he felt was that strange rush of panic one gets on awakening in an unfamiliar room, surrounded by unfamiliar faces; the second was a deep and overpowering thirst. He sat up slowly, gingerly, feeling out his limbs gently and making sure everything was where it belonged. He closed his eyes and breathed slowly, feeling his pulses throbbing in his wrists and temples. Part of his memory returned with concentration; he remembered falling into the Vortex again, and the rush and wash of the blue light of pure mathematical chaos. Other than the thirst and confusion he felt fine, and he was definitely out of the interstitial vortex. The question now was: Where was he? But that was a question that answered itself; he knew this room the instant he laid his eyes on it. It was the infirmary in the X-Men complex underneath Xavier's School in New York. He cast his eyes over the group of people who were gathered around his bed, wondering if he knew any of them. They were such an outlandish group he knew immediately they had to be a super-team - well, either that or a sideshow. Most of them he -did- know; Logan was unmistakable, and Rogue and Storm, of course. The rather cute but pissed-off-looking redhead was a complete mystery. Sam Guthrie looked older than Don remembered him, but he was the same gangling blond kid he'd always been under the extra mileage. Bobby Drake was just the same, too. And in their vanguard... ... the rest of it came back and hit him like a sledgehammer, the Vortex, Rachel, the endless frigid plummet through nothingness, the long stretching moment of transition, his raving desperation and confusion, then puzzled lucidity and blackness. He flinched as if struck a physical blow, tumbling off the infirmary bed. Various X-Men rushed to catch him, but the closest one, and the only one to reach him, was Jubilee. Don smiled weakly at her and tried to say, "Ah, Jubilation," but his throat was dry, so it came out as a coughing jag. Sam Guthrie stepped over and helped the girl buttress Don; they got him seated on the edge of the bed, and, spotting a glass of water on the bedstand next to the bed, he tossed some back, savored it, and then tried again. "Ah, Jubilation," said Don, his voice still dry and shaky. "How good to see you again! And the rest of you, too. Scratch the 'again' for some of you; I'm afraid I haven't met you all." His old friends gathered around him; the unfamiliar one hung back, looking hostile. "Well, er... " said Don, stretching his head this way and that until his neck cracked, then rolling his shoulders appreciatively. "Sorry to drop in you this way, everybody. Can somebody tell me how long I've been gone?" "First things first," said Logan. He pushed his way past Guthrie and Jubilee, stood nose-to-chest with Griffin, and inhaled deeply through his nose, then circled the bed, sniffing at Don from different angles. "You smell like you," he allowed when he was finished, "but there's another scent on you that's harder to explain." Don nodded. "I saw her... in the Vortex, Logan. I'd... I'd rather not talk about it." Logan gave his friend a long, searching look; then he nodded and grunted. "Fair enough," he said. He stepped aside, and as he did so, Don saw an eighth member of the gathering, who had been hidden until now by the fact that he was seated, not out of rudeness, but of necessity. Professor Charles Xavier was always seated. "Welcome back, Donald," said the professor with a smile on his patrician face. "You've been gone almost three years." Don sighed, a long, deep, tired sigh that seemed to diminish him in both height and breadth. Then he shook himself, almost seeming to throw off the despair that had been creeping over him like a blanket, and mustered a smile on his tired, drawn face. "I can't tell you all how good it is to see you. Even you," he said to Logan, cracking his grin a little wider. Logan smiled. "Yeah," he said. That broke the awkwardness of the occasion down a bit; Don got down from the bed, made sure he could keep standing, then accepted a handshake from the Professor, a gingerly-administered hug from Rogue, a dignified one from Storm, and a big, backslapping one from Bobby Drake, then clouted Sam Guthrie on the shoulder. "You're playing in the bigs now, huh, Sam? Still going by 'Cannonball'?" Guthrie grinned, a little shyly. "Yessir," he said, nodding. Don grinned back; he appeared to be regaining his strength. "I still think you ought to consider 'The Human Howitzer', myself, but... " He shrugged, then looked past his gathered friends to the one he didn't know. "I'm sorry, I don't think I've had the pleasure." "-What- pleasure?" snorted the redhead. Upon closer inspection, Don noticed that her eyebrows were rather... well, -bony-, with ridges of exposed bone where the slashes of hair ought to have been. Her elbows and knees sported bony spurs, too, and several more jutted from her back like the spiny ridges of a stegosaur. Well, OK, that was a little odd; he still thought she was rather cute, if pissed-off-looking. You got used to people having rough edges in the line of work Don was in; here was one who took it a bit more literally than most. Besides, stegosaurs were his favorite dinosaurs. "Girl with the winnin' disposition goes by 'Marrow'," Logan observed. "Pot, kettle, short stuff," snarled Marrow. "You're another one of these cases from their do-gooder social club days, I suppose?" "Er," said Don. "Yeah, I figured as much." She turned and stalked away, vanishing through one of the side doors. "Charming girl," Don observed. "Just makes me want to scoop her up in my arms and make all her troubles go away, except I'd probably get my lungs punctured." Logan snorted. "You'll have to excuse Sarah," said Professor Xavier, giving Logan a warning glance. "She grew up a Morlock, and so far, surface civilization doesn't find itself agreeing with her. Also, her mutant gift causes her constant pain, which would put anyone's nerves on edge." Don allowed as it would at that. Like, it appeared, most of the people on Muir Isle that rainy night, Piotr Rasputin was feeling a bit glum. He was sitting in what passed for a living room in the dorm Excalibur lived in nowadays, his big frame crumpled into a corner of a rather battered industrial sofa. The television was on, but Piotr had no idea what he was watching. It was an old black and white program which, mainly, as near as he could tell, consisted of an old white-haired gentleman and a couple of children running away from large trash cans - well, rubbish bins, he supposed, this being Britain and all. Who the old gentleman was and why the rubbish bins were homicidal were plot points he had somehow missed. He knew he should have gone to bed hours ago, but here he was, not really watching old British television, not really thinking either. He looked up as Kurt Wagner wandered into the room on the ceiling, scaled the side wall and ended up in an armchair. "Did Katya come back from her walk yet?" he asked. "Ja," replied Wagner. "She's in her room, brooding." Piotr sighed. He and Kitty had a good deal of history together. Not all of it was good, but they had put their disastrously failed romance behind them. He was more of a brother to her now, and it was a brother's sorrow for his sister's unhappiness that he felt. "Mm," he said, unable to think of anything more articulate. "Ja," replied Wagner, in perfect agreement. "What are we watching?" "I have no idea," Rasputin replied glumly. "It's that kind of night." "Ja," replied Wagner, in perfect agreement. Don re-entered his old bedroom through the door this time, stopped just inside the doorway, and looked around, feeling the warm rush of nostalgia wash over him. He'd lived in this room, studied, learned, grown, loved from afar, ached, healed, hidden, experimented, for four glorious years, in many ways the best years of his life. He didn't feel as though he'd been gone from it for as long as he really had, but even so, it had been years since he'd last lived here when he'd disappeared into the Vortex. Except for the overnight bag on the floor next to the slightly mussed bed, it was just the same as it had been when he'd moved partially out of it, intending to return for the rest of his things at a later date but never quite getting around to it. He closed his eyes and imagined the school as it had been in those days, but he thought if he kept that up he might cry, so he stopped before his memories could reach a very high resolution. Instead he walked in a little further and stood looking at himself in the mirror. "Well," he observed, scratching at his stubbly jaw. "What a mess -I- am." "Y'all -have- looked better," Sam Guthrie agreed from the doorway. Don cast an ironic look at Guthrie. "Thanks," he said wryly. He opened the wardrobe, muttering, "I don't suppose I left any clothes here... not that they'd fit, I suppose, I moved out of here when I was sixteen... hello... " He emerged from the wardrobe holding the only garment it had contained, the curiously slick gray trenchcoat, and smiled. "Haven't seen -this- in a while. I'd wondered where it had got to." He tried to put it on, stopped with about one and a half arms in it, and took it back off with a mournful look. "Too small. I've outgrown it through the shoulders." He looked back at the door and saw Jubilee coming into the room after Cannonball. Grinning, he said, "Here," and tossed it offhandedly past Guthrie to her. She caught it more out of reflex than anything else, then blinked at it, startled, as it slithered through her fingers to puddle iridescently on the floor. "You might get some use out of that," said Don as he began pulling out drawers. "What is it?" Jubilee wondered, picking up the coat and sort of juggling it in an attempt to keep it from sliding to the floor again. "Put it on and see," said Don with a grin as he moved to the second row of drawers. "Put it on, I can hardly hold it!" "It takes a little getting used to," Don admitted. "You have to learn to sort of anticipate what it's doing." Jubilee fell silent and wrestled with the coat for a few moments, finally getting one of her arms into a sleeve. Once she had it on and settled over her shoulders, she expected it to just slide off again, but it didn't; it stayed put quite nicely, and was very comfortable. She held her arms out and slid one of her hands along the opposite forearm, feeling the slick gray fabric slide past her palm. "What's this thing -made- of, anyway?" she wondered. "An advanced polymer with a ridiculously long name," Don replied. "It's from the twenty-second century." "What does it do?" she asked. Griffin grinned. "Button it up," he said. She buttoned it, except for the top button, which she left open with the coat's lapels folded back. Nothing in particular happened. She looked down at herself, then quizzically at Don. "Put up the hood, too," said Don. She complied, pulling the hood over her head and snugging the drawstring. "Now the top button." Shrugging, Jubilee fastened the coat's topmost button, and disappeared, fading into the background as though she had never been there. "Wha - !" said Guthrie. "Where'd she go?" Griffin smiled and started on the drawers to the desk, making pleased little noises as he pocketed several small items, then strapped on a bulky silver wristwatch. "I'm right here, Sam," said Jubilee's voice. "What're you, blind?" "No," said Sam with a grin as he realized what had happened, "but Ah cain't see -you-, for sure." Jubilee's head suddenly appeared as she brushed back the coat's hood. She looked down at the rest of herself. "Whoa," she said. She undid the top button, and the rest of her reappeared as well. "That coat and I had a lot of adventures," said Don with a reminiscent smile on his face as he exhausted his stock of drawers to check, "before I got more... -creative- with my thermoptic camouflage treatments." He pointed an admonishing finger at her, but the grin on his face belied it as he said, "Just don't abuse it, or I'll have to come and take it away from you." Jubilee fingered the lapels of the coat and gave him a grin. "Who, me?" she said. "Oh, Lord," moaned Sam Guthrie, putting a hand to his forehead. "I don't suppose either of you know," said Don as he rummaged through the books on the shelves, "what's become of my TARDIS." "Your wha?" said Jubilee. "Nossir, Ah don't," said Sam. "Ah reckon it's still over'n England someplace, but Ah don't know where. Muir Isle, most likely." "Something happen to the lighthouse?" Don wondered. "'Tain't there no more," Sam replied with a shrug. "Don't rightly know what happened to it." Don frowned. "Hmm. That's a shame. Well, there's nothing for it - I'm going to have to go over there and look for it. I can't do anything about this without it." "About what?" Guthrie wondered, but Don didn't seem to have heard him. He walked past the two with a thoughtful frown on his face and started marching at a purposeful pace down the hallway toward the stairs. Professor Xavier was in the hall at the bottom of the stairs; as Don reached the bottom the professor gave him an appraising look. "You look like a man on a mission," he observed. "I am," said Don. "I need to use a phone." "Certainly," said Xavier, swinging his chair and aiming it toward a nearby door. "You can use the one in my office." "Thanks," said Don, following him. He sat down in one of the chairs beside the professor's enormous desk, picked up the phone, and scanned the labels on the speed-dial buttons, finally punching the one labeled "MUIR". "This is going to be awkward," he murmured as he listened to the clicks and whirs of international call completion. Then there came a sharper click, and a woman's voice with a thick Scots burr: "Muir Isle Research Institute, Rahne Sinclair speakin'. D'ye have any idea what time 'tis?" "Rahne," said Don, smiling with relief at having the phone answered by someone he knew. "Rahne, you're not going to believe this, but this is Don Griffin." "Aye, y'r right, I dinna believe it," replied Sinclair irritably. "An' who d'ye -think- ye are, callin' at this ungodly hour an' makin' such a claim? Y'r lucky I'm the one picked up the phone - any o'the others'd be -angry-," she added wryly. "Don't hang up!" Don pleaded, easily envisioning the redheaded Scots girl winding up to bang the phone down good and proper. He wondered if he'd annoyed her enough to make her shift semi-voluntarily into her transitional werewolf form. "Why shouldnae I?" Sinclair barked back. Don's mind raced. Why nae indeed? Then he smiled as a thought struck him. "Because you'll make me cry if you do, Rainy," he replied softly. "You don't want to make poor old Griffin cry, do you?" "Dinnae call me 'Rainy', ye great - " she began, then cut off with a yelp as she realized what she was saying, and what she was saying it in response to. "Don?!" she blurted. "Yes," Don replied. "But how - but you - I canna believe - " "Me neither, come to that," Don replied. "Listen, I'm a little pressed for time right now. Are you at one of the green phones?" "Aye, but - wait!" Rahne cried. "Hold the line, dinna hang up!" There was a clatter, and Don found himself talking to an unattended instrument. With a look of confusion, he glanced up at Professor X, who shrugged. Don shrugged in return, then punched a large green key on Professor Xavier's desk phone. It began to flash brightly. His brow furrowed in concentration, he began punching a complicated series of numbers into the telephone's dialset. "If the Telephonic Translocator Grid at Muir has broken down or I'm remembering these coordinates wrong," said Don to the Professor offhandedly, "then this might be the shortest reappearance in the history of dead X-Men coming back to life... " Professor Xavier had no opportunity to respond to Griffin's wry fatalism, for in the next instant, in a burst of blue-white grid lines, the Time Lord was gone. [ Is it me, or does "Telephonic Translocator Grid" sound like the sort of phrase that ought to be preceded by "Tom Swift and his"? --G. 07/28/2K ] Kitty Pryde stood at her window and looked out at the rain. With the lights in her room off, this had approximately the same effect as walking around outside, except it was warmer. She looked at a lone streetlight, placed so as to illuminate the footpath leading to the dorm from the nearest reseach building, its light picked out in a graceful halo by the rain and the reflection against the window glass. Further back, the research building itself was only visible as a darker shadow against the dark of night. Somewhere above the rain and clouds was the starry night sky. In her day, she'd traveled among those stars, been to places she couldn't even have imagined as a little girl back in Deerfield. She remembered the time she and Logan had been taken to Gallifrey, the Time Lords' homeworld, by a funny little man with an incredible sadness lurking in his deep blue eyes. He was a cousin of Don's, a man without a name. The teenaged English girl who'd been with him had called him 'Professor', or 'Doctor'. Don told Kitty later that 'Doctor' was the only name his mentor cared to claim. They hadn't gone to Gallifrey on a pleasure cruise, of course; they'd gone to rescue Don and Rachel from the High Council of Time Lords, who wanted to execute them both - Don for stealing a TARDIS and engaging in unauthorized temporal intervention, and Rachel just for being Rachel, heir to the Phoenix. They'd gone so willingly, fought so bravely, believed so hard, and in the end they'd triumphed, and Don and Rachel had gone free... ... And now, they were both gone anyway. Where was the justice in that? What was worth bothering with, if it all would end in pain anyway? She wanted to see them again, with all her heart, in a sudden surge of emotion that made her grip the windowsill for support. In that instant, Kitty wanted more than anything to be back with them again, running for their lives through the corridors of the Council Hall: the Doctor with his indignant sense of justice and his funny umbrella; Ace and her baseball bat and her wonderful courage; Logan's rock-ribbed pragmatism even in the face of these alien surroundings and circumstances; Don with his isn't-this-fun grin even in the darkest of times (the only time she'd ever seen it fail was on that awful trip to the future New York); Rachel's star-bright, vehement determination to survive. As she stood at her window, and trembled in the heartsick grip of this nostalgia, and cursed herself for the schoolgirl foolishness it represented, there was a scuffling out in the hallway, and then someone was banging on her door. "Kitty!" the muffled voice of Rahne Sinclair called from outside. "Come quick! Telephone call from the States!" Growling with irritation at having had her funk interrupted, Kitty stuck her head through her door and snarled at Rahne, "Leave me alone, Rahne, I'm not in the mood!" "But it's - " "I don't care if it's SANTA CLAUS!" Kitty yelled. "I - don't - want - to - talk - to - ANYONE - TONIGHT!" From down the hall, somewhere behind Rahne's flustered visage, a familiar voice said softly and plaintively, "Not even me? But I've come such a long way." "Wha - !" she heard Rahne blurt, but only barely, for with the touch of that other voice to her ears, Kitty thought her heart would stop. She stepped slowly the rest of the way through her door, her breath short, wanting to believe but not quite daring to. If she believed, and it turned out to be some kind of horrible heartless prank, or worse, some villain's idea of an entrance, she'd either explode from rage or just drop dead from disappointment. Steeling herself for at best disappointment and at worst outright battle, Kitty abruptly stepped through Rahne too, and there, at the other end of the hall, was Don Griffin. He was grinning a paradoxically solemn, serious version of his old familiar grin, which got wider at the sight of her. He certainly looked authentic. He was even dressed the same as when he'd fallen into the Vortex on that horrible day. Still, caught between hope it was him and terror that it wouldn't be, Kitty wasn't convinced, until he walked up to her, leaned in close, took her shoulders in his hands, and whispered in her ear, "If you can fill the unforgiving minute / With sixty seconds' worth of distance run... " Kitty blinked, taking a half-step back and meeting his eyes. Her lips moved almost unconsciously as she murmured in response, "Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it, / And - which is more - you'll be a Man, my son!" Making certain she was still solid, Kitty threw her arms around Don and held him close, abandoning doubt and giving herself up to the sheer joy of it all. It wasn't everything she had just been wishing for - but it was a lot better than she'd ever seriously hoped to receive. In that instant, just like that, she was transported to another time and place. The dead of winter, upstate New York. The wind blew snow against the high windows of the great Edwardian mansion, but inside the library of Professor Charles Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters, a merry fire burned. Kitty was fourteen, still only beginning to learn the extent to which her life had changed. Don Griffin, the school's newest student and the comrade - she winced inwardly at the mental choice of words - she was probably closest to these days, was sitting on a sofa, staring into the fire, his face stony and blank. She knew what was bothering him. Griffin had the most fantastic, intuitive grasp of time and space, energy and matter, and their interrelationships that Kitty had ever seen or heard of. His capacity for learning was vast; his intellect ignored all concept of boundary or limit in its ability to absorb and record. But those abilities, while remarkable, weren't much direct good in the endless string of battles that seemed to dog life with the X-Men. This had been pointed out in extremely direct and painful fashion by the events of the last such battle. Now, having had his nose rubbed in his own ineffectiveness, Don felt useless - worse, a hindrance - and she knew he was considering going back to Maine, despite the joy he took in the friends he'd found since coming to the school. She wished she could do something to help him, show him that what his power happened to be wasn't the important part. As she leafed idly through a book of poetry, not really paying attention to it, she racked her brains trying to think of something, anything, to say that would give him back some pride in himself, motivate him to use that intellect to find some way of making a bigger contribution. And then she turned a page, and the printing on the next one almost leaped up at her. She felt her breath catch in her throat as she read over the text, and then a smile spread across her face. Ask, she said to herself, and you shall receive. Clearing her throat, she began to read the page's words aloud, knowing that Don would hear: "If you can keep your head when all about you Are losing theirs and blaming it on you; If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, But make allowance for their doubting too: If you can wait and not be tired by waiting, Or being lied about, don't deal in lies, Or being hated don't give way to hating, And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise:" Don stirred, turning with his arm thrown over the top of the sofa so that he could look at her as she read. "If you can dream - and not make dreams your master; If you can think - and not make thought your aim, If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster, And treat those two imposters just the same; If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools, Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken, And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools:" Don was standing now, walking slowly toward the table at which Kitty sat, a deep, thoughtful frown on his face. At least I've got him thinking, she told herself as she continued. "If you can make one heap of all your winnings And risk it on one turn of the pitch-and-toss, And lose, and start again at your beginnings And never breathe a word about your loss; If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew To serve your turn long after they have gone, And so hold on when there is nothing in you Except the Will which says to them: 'Hold on!'" Kitty's heart leaped as she saw Don's face take on that small, closed smile she'd come to know so well in the time she'd known him - the smile that meant he'd latched onto some idea and was now determined to worry at it until it gave up all its secrets. In full swing now, she could feel the note of triumph in her voice as she concluded: "If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue, Or walk with Kings - nor lose the common touch, If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you, If all men count with you, but none too much; If you can fill the unforgiving minute With sixty seconds' worth of distance run, Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it, And - which is more - you'll be a Man, my son!" Then, with a dramatic flourish, she clapped the volume shut, stood up, and looked her compatriot in the eyes. They were very blue, and they twinkled. They hadn't twinkled since the battle. His private smile broke into his equally familiar - and equally missing, of late - public grin. "Katherine," he said, placing one warm hand against her cheek, "you are a revelation." Then he placed a quick, chaste kiss on her lips, turned on his heel, and marched briskly from the room, a young man on a mission, leaving Kitty simultaneously stunned he'd actually kissed her - for all his outlandish dress and outgoing quips he was actually quite shy in some respects - and elated that she'd made such a difference. Well, she corrected herself. Me and Rudyard Kipling. The memory dissolved. Kitty was back on Muir, older, she hoped wiser, but the elation was the same. She had Don, her knight and confessor and best friend, back from the void which had consumed him on that awful day in the midst of awful days, and now that she had him she feared she'd lose him again if she ever let him go. Fiercely, she banished the thought. Never. She'd lost too much, too fast, in her life already. There they remained, her head on his shoulder, his hands spread across her back, rocking slowly on their feet, for several minutes or an eternity, depending on how you care to measure such things. Rahne Sinclair, her composure rapidly restored by the appearance of Griffin in the flesh, saw how it was to be, smiled, and quietly excused herself. Don and Kitty didn't notice her go. Slowly, they separated; Kitty opened her door and they sat down on the edge of her bed to talk - of things that had transpired while Don was gone, of things shared before his disappearance, of anything that came to mind. When the sun rose over Muir Isle, they had talked themselves out. Wrapped in the warmth of their memories and hopes, they lay back, Kitty nestled in the crook of Don's arm, and drifted off to sleep. When Kitty awoke, the sight of the sun dipping toward evening disoriented her severely for a few moments. She had to pause and wrestle with her still-awakening brain, wringing from it the understanding of how her living schedule had become reversed, the all-nighter she'd had, the reasons for it... Oh, yes. She sat up and noticed that the reason in question was no longer in the room. Well, she couldn't say that surprised her too much. Don didn't need very much sleep - in the New York of the future he'd demonstrated that he could get by comfortably on about six hours a week - so he'd no doubt risen and gone off in search of food long before. Smiling, she got up, took off the rumpled clothes she'd slept in, replaced them with a terrycloth dressing gown, and hunted up fresh clothes before padding to the bathroom, humming a tune. When she reached the bathroom, it occurred to Kitty to chide herself. She certainly wasn't acting like a girl who'd seen her sweetheart pack his bags and disappear over the horizon just the day before. She mulled it over as she brushed her teeth. Was she letting the one event overshadow the other? Was she just avoiding the issue? Was that healthy? Oh, the hell with it, she decided, setting the shower and waiting for the water to heat up. Maybe there's a balance to life after all. Don was standing at the edge of a crag, looking west across the water at the blazing sunset. Over there, assuming one followed the curvature of the Earth, was Ireland, and beyond that, Iceland, Greenland, North America. The vast Pacific, the huge expanse of Asia, the cluttered muddle of Europe, and there you were in Britain again. If you went straight... hmm... at this time of day, at this time of year, you'd end up in the constellation Kasterborous... near Gallifrey. Well, that's no good. Big planet, bigger universe... and not the only one of its kind. He frowned, chin in hand, and thought about that for a few moments, then turned to see Kitty approaching. "Sleep well?" he asked, smiling. "Fairly," she replied. "You look like you're doing some hard thinking." "I am," he admitted. Hands thrust into pockets, he went on, "Nothing definite, though. I'll tell you when I know more." They stood and watched the sun sink into the sea. Don closed his eyes as the final orange sliver slipped beneath the waves, and imagined the situation as it really was - the planet spinning on its axis, whirling through space at dizzying speed around the Sun - that august body itself streaking across the cosmos in its eternal orbit round the center of the Mutter's Spiral Galaxy. The galaxy itself moved with its clustermates, billions of stars interacting in an all-but-endless cosmic ballet... "What will you do now?" Kitty's voice asked him quietly. The universe spun away in an ever-expanding spiral, and he opened his eyes to see the sun gone and the sky barred in beautiful bands of pink and purple. "I have to find my TARDIS," he said, turning to her. "Do you know what became of it?" "Alistair Stuart has it, at the Weird Happenings Organisation office in London. He was hoping he might figure out how to use it to rescue you and Rachel." She stopped, putting her fingertips to her lips. "Oh, no. Has - has anyone told you about - " Don turned back to the dying glow of the set sun, closed his eyes, nodded, and told her what he'd told Logan; and like Logan she accepted it without question. Unlike Logan, she gave him a hug from behind as she did so. That was just as well. Though he counted Logan as one of his best friends, he'd have felt as if the universe were tipping if the Canadian had suddenly become the touchy-feely type; and anyway, Kitty was a lot cuter. He patted her hands where they crossed on his chest, then turned back to face her. She broke away and stepped back so they could see each other's faces in the deepening twilight. "Can you contact Alistair?" he asked. "I need my TARDIS, and fast." "Why? What's the hurry?" Kitty asked as they set off for the Muir complex again. "I won't know for sure until I have it," he replied. "I'd rather not say any more until then - don't want to give anybody any false impressions." She gave him a speculative look, but held her tongue, replying only, "OK. How did you get here so fast if you don't have it? Rahne said you were calling from the States, and suddenly there you were." He grinned. "Has nobody been using my Telephonic Translocator Grid?" She laughed. "No! I'd forgotten all about it. Nobody could ever remember the damn -coordinates- but -you-, they're, what, forty-odd digits long?" "Forty-five," said Don. A large shape loomed suddenly up from behind one of the outbuildings as they passed it on their way to the lab complex; Don recoiled in surprise before recognizing the hulking form of Piotr Rasputin. "Pete!" Don cried, clutching dramatically at his shirt front. "Don't scare me like that." Rasputin had jumped back a little too; he clearly hadn't been expecting nearly to run down somebody else as he emerged from behind the outbuilding. He smiled hugely. "Don!" the Russian bellowed, grabbing the smaller man up in an embrace. "So it was true! Kurt and I wondered if living on this boring island had finally driven Rahne out of her mind." Putting Griffin back down, he continued in an admonishing tone, "But what have you been -doing- all day?" "Sleeping, mostly," Don replied. "How have you been, Pete?" "I cannot complain," said Rasputin as the threesome resumed their walk to the lab complex. "Well, I -can-, but I choose not to. It does not accomplish anything." Inside the lab, in one of the lounges, Kitty picked up a telephone and dialed, then waited. "Dr. Stuart, please. Alistair? Hi, it's Kitty Pryde. Fine, thanks. Listen, you'll never guess who popped back out of the Chronal Vortex yesterday. No... no, Don Griffin. Uh-huh. Yeah, that's what I said. Anyway, I know it's inconvenient, but he needs his TARDIS back right away, and - " She stopped, blinked, scowled. "What? No, no, say that again. They WHAT? And you LET them?! My God, Alistair, that's a hyper-advanced alien vehicle you're talking about, not an appliance! No, no, I'm sorry, it's not your fault. I have to go. Uh-huh. Bye." She hung up, then turned to her friends, a look of disbelief on her face. "Your TARDIS was seized from the W.H.O. by the Canadian government," she said to Don. "They walked in there with a transfer order six months ago, and those idiots just let them -have- it!" Don looked momentarily shocked, then angry, then resigned, the emotions playing across his face like a stock ticker. "Damn," he muttered. "I'm sorry, Don, it's my fault," said Kitty. "I let Alistair take it because I thought it would be safer in his lab than at the lighthouse." "No, it's all right," said Don. "It's not your fault. You couldn't have known... the Canadians, they've wanted a TARDIS for some time now. This isn't the first time they've tried to get their hands on mine." He stood up. "I'm going to have to go get it." Kitty got up as well. "I'll come with - " "No," said Don, holding up a hand. "Better if I do this part alone. What I need you to do... " He paused, thinking. "OK, I'm going to have to tell you." He looked from Kitty to Kurt to Piotr, then back to Kitty. "I might be wrong about this; if I am I'm about to worry you all for nothing, but better safe than sorry." He took a breath, held it for a moment, and said, "I saw Rachel in the Time Vortex. She said she'd... died, and she'd come to the Vortex to send me home with the last of her strength. She also told me -why- she'd done such a thing, and it wasn't entirely for love of me." He paused again, gathering his thoughts and his strength, and went on, "Ray thinks... thought... that the universe is collapsing. She wasn't sure of the details, but she showed me what she'd felt through the Phoenix effect, and I think she was right. I think our universe has split away from the main thread of the timestream, broken off like a river whose course has abruptly changed far upstream... and like that piece of river, an isolated timestream is doomed." "But - how could something like that happen?" Kurt Wagner asked. "I'm not sure, Kurt," Griffin admitted. "Probably too much unregulated modification - badly planned temporal engineering. Retroactive time modifications, irresponsible time travel, badly designed hypertime shunts. It's all bad. Too many people messing with a timestream too often, without adequate safety precautions and a solid understanding of what they're doing to spacetime, can have horrible consequences. "Ray herself probably contributed to it in some measure - it's my guess that that's why she was aware of it, and one of the reasons she went to such length to make possible what she thought was the best way to put it right." He sighed. "I only hope she was right, and there's something I can do about it." "What can we do?" Kitty asked. "What you can do," Don replied, "is gather your most critical things, gather all the people you care most about, and get them and yourselves to Xavier's School by tomorrow afternoon. Ray thought we had a week or so, but she was no dimensional engineer, so she might have been wrong -either way-. I know it'll be hard, but you've got to limit yourselves to those you can find and find fast." He paused, then went on, "If you haven't found everybody you're looking for by tomorrow afternoon, you'll have to give up and get to the mansion without them. It's only an emergency measure anyway; I hope I'll be able to stabilize the timestream without having to evacuate. But if I can't, then we're going to have to cram who and what we can find into the TARDIS and get out - fast. Like Rachel told me, -something- of our world has to survive." His three fellow former X-Men looked back at him with worry plain in their eyes, but also understanding, and above all else, trust. They nodded. "Go, then," he said, "and I'll see you tomorrow." They went. Kitty lingered for a moment after the other two had gone, turning back from the doorway to say, "Don... " "Yes?" he replied. "Do you really think you can stop it?" "I'm going to give it everything I have," he replied. "It's all I can do." She smiled at the determination on his face and in his voice. "Hell of a thing, isn't it," she said, "your first day back and already you've got to save the world. You ought to at least get a week off in between." Don grinned. "It's just as well," said he. "Got to fill that unforgiving minute, haven't I?" Kitty chuckled. "I guess you have at that," she said. Then, sobering, she said, "Do you think Ray was right about... herself?" He looked at her, and the ache that flashed out of his eyes made her instantly regret the question; but all he said was, "It sure felt that way." Kitty went silently to him, took his hands in hers, and looked him in the eyes. She didn't need to say anything; he knew perfectly what she was offering. It was what she always offered him, and all her friends - her complete, unconditional support, under any conditions, to do whatever she could to help in any situation. "Get to New York," he said softly. "Don't be late. I won't lose you, too." She nodded gravely and held his eyes for another full second; then, kissing him on the cheek, she was gone. Don picked up the phone, dialed Xavier's, and began to dial the Telephonic Translocator code for Professor X's office. Back in New York, he gathered the Professor, Logan and Storm in Xavier's office and gave them the same speech he'd given Kitty, Kurt and Piotr. Three of them left the office afterward, bound on different errands; Xavier stayed at his desk, making telephone calls and using his other, more unique methods of contact. "Logan, is the Cord still in the garage?" asked Don as he and the Canadian walked down the main hall together. "Wouldn't be anyplace else," Logan replied. "You need a hand with the folks up north?" "Best I do it myself, I think," he replied. "Besides, you'll be needed here. We're going to need as many experienced voices as possible to direct the traffic." Don paused, looking down at his ragged clothes. "I could use some cash, though. Got to get some new clothes and such." Logan dug out his wallet and handed over a wad of money. "At least this time we've got time to do some flamin' planning," he grumped. "You be careful up there. Need any help, you call, and Kentucky 'n me'll come runnin'. He's fast enough." Don nodded. "See you soon," he said, and peeled off toward the garage while Logan continued to the activities room. In the school's garage, which contained quite an impressive collection of vehicles, Don went straight to one tarp-covered shape in the back, whipped the cover off it, and afforded himself a moment to smile. 'The Cord' was a 1937 Cord 812 convertible coupe, black on black with a rich burgundy leather interior, its chrome still gleaming after five years gathering dust under the tarp in Xavier's garage. Don thumbed open the garage door, then put the Cord's top down, taking the opportunity for a quick walkaround as he did so. The car looked fine, all tires full, no drips; some thoughtful soul had kept the registration and safety inspection current, so it apparently hadn't sat in precisely the same place continuously for those five years. Satisfied, Don slid behind the wheel, flipped down the sun visor, caught the key that fell into his hand, slotted it into the dash, put down the clutch and gave the key a twist. The engine started instantly, with a throaty rumble that brought another nostalgic smile to Don's face. Perfect running order. One thing gone right. He put the Cord in gear, nosed it carefully around the Professor's Bentley, and rolled down the drive toward Graymalkin Lane. It wasn't until he was speeding up the Cross-Westchester Expressway toward the Tappan Zee that he half-turned his head to the back seat and called over the roar of the wind, "You can come out now, Jubilation." There was a muffled curse, a moment's pause, and then Jubilee's head popped back into visibility, followed by the rest of her as she unfastened the top button of her coat. "How'd you know I was there?" she demanded. Don smiled. "Early-model thermoptic camouflage like that coat makes a very faint high-frequency sound. I can hear it." She scowled, climbing over the seatback and plopping down on the passenger seat. "That's cheating. So why'd you let me come if you knew I was there?" "Because trying to talk you out of it would have been a waste of time. I'd have had to Chronolock you or something to get you to stay behind, and I'd rather save my energy in case the Canadians give me trouble." "Chrono-wha?" "Freeze you in time. Actually that's almost impossible - but shove you out of step with the main stream so that a second for you takes something like a week in real time. That's close enough for government work." "Oh. Sounds uncomfortable." "Actually you don't notice a thing, except that everything's changed around you while you were out of step. Unless someone tried to move you while you were locked - then you tend to get flung rather violently in whatever direction they were pushing." Jubilee squirmed uncomfortably at the thought. Nothing more was said for some time. They made their way northwestward to the New York Thruway, and once they were on open road with their Thruway ticket tucked under the sun visor, Don put his foot down. The Cord's engine purred ever so slightly louder, and presently a pleasantly pitched mechanical whine overlaid the purr as the supercharger kicked in. The speedometer wound up to 220 miles per hour and stayed there as solid as a rock when Don touched a non-original but discreetly installed control on the car's instrument panel. Then he touched another one next to it, and with a slight shiver of the air around the passenger compartment, the thundering roar of the wind vanished, reduced to the soft whirring hum you would expect to hear in the cabin of a modern luxury car at highway cruise. "Whoa," Jubilee murmured. The airflow hadn't been cut off - she could still feel the wind slapping her face and whipping her hair around, though it didn't seem to be battering her as much as she'd expect a 220-mile-an-hour slipstream to do. She looked sidelong at Griffin. "Hey, Don?" "Mm?" he replied. "Look, don't take this the wrong way or anything, but... what -are- you?" "How do you mean?" he asked. "Well, when you popped out of the Twilight Zone and then passed out I tried to listen to your heart - only it was in stereo." "Oh, that's normal," replied Don. "I told you, I'm a Time Lord." "No you didn't." "Didn't I? Sorry, I thought I had. Well, then - I'm a Time Lord." "Well, thank you very much," replied Jubilee sarcastically. "Now what the flamin' hell's a Time Lord? I thought you were from Maine or something." Don glanced at her, grinning slightly. "Such language," he said. "You must hang out with Logan." She gave him a look that was half-scowl, half-pout. "Answer my question," she insisted. "It's a long story," Don cautioned. "I've got time," Jubilee replied. Don tried to look put-upon, but failed, and relented with a grin. "Fine, OK. It happened like this. "When I was a kid, people noticed I was smart. Smart in a weird way, I mean. Not just good at learning things out of books, although I -was- that. I had a grasp of... of -spatial geometry- that bordered on the fantastic. I could look at something and see intuitively how it would act if affected by forces in this way or that way, or take something apart and see how all the components interacted with each other to make the system work. I was fixing toasters when I was four and making improvements to my school's computers in first grade. I was -hell- at billiards because I could -see- the way the balls would interact with the table and each other. And as I got older, the talent got more and more pronounced. "In junior high, I blew away the curve on some standardized test or another - partially because I knew most of the answers and partially because I understood the probabilities of the multiple choice punch-card system they used for scoring the test well enough to guess right on the occasional question I didn't know the answer to. My 'lucky breaks' in things like math and basketball were becoming more and more bizarre. People started to notice." "Basketball?!" Jubilee interrupted. Don nodded. "I wasn't a very athletic kid - hell, I'm not a very athletic adult, though I've got some modifications that make me tougher than I look - but if I could get a clear shot, it would go -down-, -period-. That kind of thing gets noticed after a while. People started to think it was -luck-. I got sent down to Boston, to a specialist, for all kinds of tests, and finally the result came back in: My memory, my intuitive grasp of time and space, my supposed 'luck', were the results of a cerebral abnormality caused by an apparently random genetic aberration." "... Your brain's different 'cause you're a mutant," Jubilee translated after a moment. "Exactly," said Don. "I bet -that- made you popular. What'd you do?" "Well, nothing, at first. I mean, I'd heard of them before, but in Maine, that kind of thing never seemed all that important. I'm not saying there isn't racism in Maine, but while I lived there it was never very loud. For one thing, there aren't a lot of people in Maine who're 'different', and it's hard to discriminate against what isn't there. Anyway, I shrugged and went back to school. Science wasn't a particular challenge, never had been, but I'd always been fascinated by history and the like, so there was still some point in going. "My parents tried to keep me from finding out, but eventually they had to tell me that the school department didn't particularly want me back after the end of that year - that would have been seventh grade. They said I was distracting the other students, but I found out later on it was really pressure from parents. They weren't comfortable with their kids sharing class with somebody who got an 'unfair advantage' over their kids through genetic chance." Jubilee snorted. "Yeah. Like it's your -fault- you're smart." Don shrugged. "I can kind of see their point. If I had stayed I would have wanted my grades, at least in the subjects where my gift came into the picture, not to count against the curve - that -would- have been unfair. Anyway, my parents figured they ought to find some other place for me to continue my education. Dad didn't really want to move, so they looked into boarding schools. (Mom wanted to sue the town and put me back in the local schools, but that's another story.) They got good leads on a couple of schools - one of them was the Massachusetts Academy, in fact, but Mom didn't like the look of the administrators and vetoed it. Perceptive woman, my mother." Jubilee snickered. "So let me guess - you ended up at Xavier's in New York." "Entirely correct," said Don, grinning. "And that was a hoot, but I still didn't know what I was really -good- for. My, er, powers weren't all that useful either, given the usual sort of punch-ups the X-Men tended to get into in those days. So, I rolled with it. I hung around in the background, sorting things out, thinking of stuff, improvising. I could do some pretty impressive things with technology, but I didn't have much of a budget, so most of my stuff was made from junk and didn't work very well. "I probably wouldn't have had any confidence at all," he added as they blew past a New York state trooper, "if it weren't for the fact that the X-Men were a family. I was always an outsider as a child, and the sense of, of -belonging- I got when I was with the X-Men gave me the impetus to keep trying. My best friends in those days were probably Bobby Drake and Kitty Pryde." Jubilee chuckled. "Drake's a wacko." She looked back, but the statie didn't seem even to have noticed them. "That's one of the things I've always dug about him," Don replied, paying the trooper no mind at all. "His power was lame too, when he started out. Frosty the X-Man didn't exactly strike fear into the hearts of evil-doers. He was the one who showed me that no matter how messed up the rest of the world gets, if you can keep your sense of humor you can stay ahead of it all." "And Kitty?" Don pondered it for a moment, then smiled. "Kitty Pryde is very probably the first girl I ever loved. If there was anybody before her, I can't remember." "Whoa. Pretty personal stuff. You sure you want to keep going with this? I mean, you hardly know me." Don shrugged, one hand at 12 o'clock on the wheel, the other along the top of his door. "There's something about you I trust without thinking," he remarked. "I've learned to accept that instinct when it strikes me." "Ooookay, whatever you say." "Unless I'm boring you." "No, no. Actually, I think it's rilly interesting. You can't have been much older'n me when I fell in with the X-Men. It's neat talking with somebody who had the same... perspective, y'know?" "From what I've heard, you took it with a lot more aplomb than I did. The whole thing freaked me out pretty good. Took me a while to really find my niche, but it sounds to me like you jumped in with both feet." Jubilee pondered that one over for a few minutes, then nodded. "Yeah... pretty much didn't have a choice, though. Anyway, go on with the dirt about you 'n Pryde," she added with a sly grin. "Well, actually, there isn't any," replied Don. "But you said - " "Yeah... y'know, I think that was the first time I ever actually told anybody that." "You mean you never said anything?" "'Course not. She was dating Colossus at the time. I know a bad idea when I have one, usually. After that... I dunno, it was always a bad time, or something else was going on, and then I was with Rachel... " He paused, his gaze focusing off into infinity somewhere, as he added wistfully, "I think it's going to take me a long time to get used to thinking of her in the past tense." Considering he'd only heard of her demise a short while earlier, many people would have thought Don's reaction rather cold. For a moment Jubilee did - but she realized as she thought it that his mind simply worked differently than that. He had something to do that he thought was terribly important, and he was trying to go on and do it; he'd say his goodbyes later, when the crisis was over, if he was in any condition to. Jubilee could -feel- the pain underlying the wistfulness in his voice, deeper than a scream could convey. That leap of understanding almost stunned her. How could she know this man so thoroughly after only a few hours? Part of it was undoubtedly because of what she'd seen, what he'd said and done, just after he'd come out of the mirror, when she'd see his naked desperation, his terror and anguish at being left behind by his beloved laid bare by the confusion and delusion of an unbuffered time/space transition. Yet, as she thought about that, she realized that -that- was only part of it; what he'd said of her was also true of him. There was an undefinable something about Donald Griffin that made Jubilee feel she could trust him. It was the same quiet quality that had drawn her to Wolverine, and to Shadowcat, too, when they'd met - a combination of loyalty and courage, and something else deeper down and harder to pin a name on. She had it, he had it, the two others in her thoughts had it, and it, whatever it was, linked them all together in a way mere acquaintance couldn't match. "Still, what I felt for Kitty shaped my life, whether she knew about it or not," Don went on, having recovered his composure. "I pushed myself to be as brave as she was, as tough as she was, as compassionate as she was. She was coming from a great deal more adversity than I was and she rarely complained. I was really struck by that. I tried to match her in the qualities I thought were better about her than me, I suppose in an attempt to make myself feel I was worthy of her." Jubilee smiled. "I know the feeling." "Most of what I am today, I owe to her example," said Don. "Hers and the Doctor's." "Who?" "This is where I get to the part about Time Lords," Don said with a grin. "The planet Gallifrey, near the galactic core in the constellation Kasterborous, is home to the universe's oldest civilization. The Time Lords are their academic elite - masters of technologies and sciences beyond human imagining. But Time Lord society is very stagnant, very... hidebound. Ten million years of absolute power will do that. They have a strict policy of non-intervention, they're very insular, almost xenophobic. "Well, in any society like that, you're going to get the occasional iconoclast. Some are good... some aren't. Still with me?" "Galactic core. Time Lords. Iconoclasts. Gotcha so far." Jubilee nodded firmly, to show that she was really paying attention. "Well, one of those iconoclasts goes by the name 'the Doctor'. If he has another name I've never managed to learn it. He's kind of an outcast Time Lord - very old, very powerful, but he's never liked their isolationist politics, and he keeps ticking off the Establishment by going out into the cosmos to see things. When I was just starting out with the X-Men, we encountered him once, in the middle of investigating some strange happenings down South that turned out to involve some long-time enemies of his - nasty robotic fellows called Cybermen. They were human-like once, but over time replaced everything about themselves with mechanical parts, programmed out their emotions, and wound up with a nasty habit of conquering other civilizations to make Cybermen out of them." "Sorta like the Borg," Jubilee observed. "Sort of. Cybermen don't have a collective consciousness, or a hive structure, or the Borg mania for adaptiveness. They're into brute force and obedience. Anyway, the Cybermen had come back to Earth and were up to no good down South, and in the process of fighting them off we ran into the Doctor. He and I sort of hit it off; my power was actually -useful- for something, we were up against -cyborgs-. When he left he gave me a locator beacon, and told me that if I ever needed his help, to activate it and he'd come running. "A few months after that, we were dealing with a problem to do with the alternate future Rachel came from. A lot of weird stuff happened, but the short version is that I got blown out of Time." "-Blown out of TIME-?!" Jubilee repeated. "That's what -I- said. I ended up on a deserted planetoid, all that will be left of Earth in some ungodly number of years, after the Sun is gone. My armor - I'd built the second Griffin powersuit by then, the first really decent one - kept me alive, but it was damaged and losing power. I was seriously screwed, so I tagged the Doctor's beacon and hoped for the best. Then I blacked out. "I woke up aboard the Doctor's TARDIS - his time machine. You remember the one I took you back to Oz with that one time?" She nodded. "That was mine. The Doctor's is a slightly earlier model, but the same basic idea. He was having some trouble controlling his, though, so we rambled around for a while - a couple of months, subjective time - until finally he gave up and returned to Gallifrey to make repairs." "I thought you said he was an outcast," said Jubilee. "He is," said Don. "But he's also the Lord President of the High Council of Time Lords, so they have to cut him some slack." "How'd -that- happen?" "I've never asked. Anyway, there we were on Gallifrey, the Planet of Time - the home of the greatest technologies and sciences the universe has to offer. I was having a hell of a time, though the locals weren't very friendly. The repairs took longer than the Doctor had thought, so we were stuck there with nothing to do but read - but WHAT there was to read! I plowed through a decent chunk of their library before the High Council intervened. They were furious with the Doctor for allowing an outworlder, a non-student at one of the Chapter Academies of Time, study their texts, and demanded that he stop me." Don grinned broadly at the memory. "So the Doctor exercised his authority as Lord President to enroll me in his old school, the Prydonian Chapter Academy." Jubilee goggled. "No way! The old guys must have had a stroke." "For a while I thought the old Chancellor was going to," Don allowed. "The administration at the school wasn't too thrilled either. Seemed like a hundred times a day they told me it was inevitable I'd fail. They rode me, -oh- they rode me - graded me twice as harshly as any native student, watched me like hawks, waiting for -any- infraction so they could throw me out - but I stuck it out. It was the hardest thing I ever did, but I wouldn't quit. I wouldn't give them the satisfaction - and anyway, it wasn't something Kitty would do." Jubilee smirked. "Made 'em eat their predictions, huh?" Don smirked back. "With hot sauce," he replied. "I walked out of there valedictorian of the Class of 11239495. But the Doctor had left Gallifrey by then, and as my reward for embarrassing them in front of the other Chapter Academies, the Prydonian Council assigned me to a clerical job in the Council Chambers. Not a job for a Time Lord - they were going to waste my training on the local equivalent of typing and filing because they couldn't stand the idea of 'the Doctor's bastard son' outperforming a 'real' Time Lord in the field." He shrugged. "So I stole a TARDIS and went home, to a few days after the battle I got timelost during." "You -stole- it?" "Yup. I was in serious hot water when they finally caught up with me, I can tell you - but it's all taken care of now. We sorted it out, back in the day, the Doctor, Logan, Kitty, and Rachel and me... " He fell silent, the grin disappearing from his face. "Rachel and me," he repeated softly. Jubilee saw the black mood sweep over him like a shadow on the moon, recognized it for what it was, and let him be. It was another thing that reminded her of herself, and of Logan. She got the same way if she was caught off-guard by a thought of her parents, and Logan... what -didn't- Logan have in his past that could cause a mood like that? She reached across the car, hesitantly, and patted his right forearm, feeling a bit silly and awkward. He glanced down at her hand, blinking away a pair of tears, then transferred his left hand back to the wheel so that he could take hers in his right and draw what comfort he could from the simplicity of that human touch. In that moment, Donald Griffin and Jubilation Lee silently sealed the pact of friendship they'd been constructing for the last half hour. Nothing more was said until they reached Canada. Don stood at the reception desk in the lobby of a Canadian government building, staring levelly and somewhat intently at the receptionist. When he and Jubilee had arrived in Ottawa, they'd found a mall and a motel in that order. Don had showered, shaved and put on fresh clothes in the motel room before heading to this building, so at the cost of not arriving until mid-evening, he was clean, fresh, and mostly un-rumpled, in jeans, t-shirt, and unbuttoned dress shirt, an Ottawa Senators cap on his head, hands in the pockets of a blue jean jacket. The shower and change of clothes, as well as a quick meal of burgers and fries at a roadside drive-in, had gone a long way toward restoring his chipperness. He'd also hunted up a pair of new eyeglasses, although these were round rather than octagonal like his old pair. He gazed through them at the receptionist, arms folded in front of him on the counter, as she said to him, "Sir, I understand that you feel some urgency in this matter, but it -is- nearly nine PM." "That," said Don calmly, "is hardly relevant. Your department is in possession of my property, and I'm here to take it back. The time of day is immaterial. I expect you to return my property immediately." "What property would that be, sir?" "It will most likely have taken the shape of a beverage vending machine," said Don. "That's the form it seems most comfortable with. It'll be in whatever section your scientists study alien technologies in." "Alien technologies." "Yes." "Sir, I haven't the authority to release any - " "Then will you please get me someone who has." "At this hour, sir, I would have to get the Director." "Fine. Get him, please." "Sir, I can't - " "Maybe I haven't made myself clear," Don said, keeping his voice level, even cheerful. "Your organization has something that belongs to me. You took it without permission. All I'm asking is for you to give it back and all will be forgiven. Otherwise, you want to make things difficult... " Don shrugged and smiled, not altogether nicely. "I can -do- difficult." "Are you threatening me, sir?" "No. No, miss, I am not threatening you, personally." Don stood up, removing his arms from the counter and putting his hands in his pockets. "I'm threatening Department H," he went on personably. "If I don't get my property back within an hour, I'm going to go looking for it, and if that means dismantling this entire building, well, then this building gets dismantled. Now I would appreciate it if you would put me in touch with somebody in authority, right now, without delay." The receptionist weighed this argument for a moment, then said, "Would you wait over there, please, sir, and I'll telephone the Director." Don knew, as he sat down on the leather bench in the lobby, exactly what she was really going to do. He held out some faint hope that she wouldn't do it - that she was, in fact, calling the Director of Department H, that they would be reasonable for once and give him back his TARDIS before any more precious time was wasted. But deep down inside, he knew she was really calling a security force. Still, determined to be as polite as possible, he took out a book and started reading, waiting for their arrival. Shortly, he felt himself being watched, and, looking over the top of the book, he saw that this was due to the squad of seven heavily armed and facelessly armored men standing around him. Slowly, deliberately, he marked his place by dogearing a page, then put the book back in his jacket pocket and leaned back on the bench. "Gentlemen," he said pleasantly. "Sir, I have to ask you to leave the premises," said the one with the rank stripes on his shoulder pauldron. Don shook his head. "You guys just... don't... -understand-, do you?" he asked, getting to his feet. "Look, I've tried to be pleasant. I've tried to be patient. I've tried, Rassilon help me, to be -polite-." Then he abruptly burst into motion, seizing the man by the web harness he wore over his armored breastplate, spinning halfway around and slamming him into the wall next to the bench. The guard let out a surprised yelp as his fellows backed off in confusion. The maneuver was audacious, but not exactly the kind of style the Department H guards had come to expect from the -usual- sort of interloper, and they weren't quite sure what to do about it. Thrusting his face belligerently into the guard's, Don continued in a furious hiss, "But I don't have -time- to be pleasant, patient or polite any more. You wankers in Department H like to think of yourselves as a shadow government, cleverly maneuvering things behind the scenes, but your petty machinations interest me less than the tunneling of ants. Your world is running out of -time- and you're keeping me away from the one thing that I might be able to use to save it. Now are you going to show me to my property, or will I have to find it myself?" The guard, at a loss, failed to reply. "Fine." Don dropped him, turned, and walked through the double doors leading deeper into the building. "Hey, hold it!" cried another of the guards as they collected their wits and ran after him. "You're not authorized in this area!" Don ignored them, following the convenient color-coded lines on the floor toward the Research & Development area. Presently, he came to an open security door. Stepping through it, he turned, watched the guards run toward him for a moment, then took a sonic screwdriver from his pocket and triggered the locking mechanism, slamming the door down in their path. Regarding the tool for a moment, he mused absently, "He's right, they -are- about the most useful things in the universe." Then, pocketing the screwdriver and taking a small tracking device from an inside pocket, he started searching for the specific location of his TARDIS's dimensional stabilizer signature. The screwdriver enabled him to bypass another security door which was actually -closed-, and then he found himself standing in front of a cryptically marked laboratory door, looking down at the frantically indicating face of his time/space anomaly tracker. "Well, either this is it," he murmured, "or they're trying to perfect void locking on their own." Jubilee materialized next to him, undoing the top button of her thermoptic coat. "You handled that pretty slick," she told him. "Didn't need me at all." "Sure I need you," he replied, glowering at the lock panel on the lab door. "I don't have an Electrocode Confounder on me. Can you blow this lock?" "Can I blow that lock," Jubilee replied smugly. She bowed to him with an artistic flourish toward the lock. "Sir, you may consider that lock -blown-." A moment later, the lock was indeed blown. The two of them barged into the lab as if they owned the place, ignoring the scurrying confusion of white-coated and radsuited scientists and techs. "I love your style, Jubilation," said Don jauntily as he led the way through the door and into the lab. The room was big and white, with a three-steps-deep pit about ten feet across in the middle of it, surrounded by a number of robotic arms and surmounted by a curious affair that looked rather like a miniature Gateway Arch. The ceiling above the pit rose to a rather acrobatic height and culminated in a sensor array that looked disturbingly like a giant eye. Positioned directly beneath that eye, under the Arch, was a vending machine - a metal and plastic box about seven feet tall, three feet wide and two feet deep, with a backlit plastic front panel and painted sides bearing the somewhat garish livery of Pepsi-Cola. The Pepsi machine was a fairly recent model, with nine selection buttons and a dollar-bill feeder in addition to the familiar coin slot, and it asked sixty-five cents for a twelve-ounce can of the beverage of your choice, which was a pretty good deal in this day and age. Its compressor could be heard running quietly under the whirring, beeping and scientist-shouting noise of the room. "Good evening, gentlemen, no need to panic," Don announced loudly as he and Jubilee strode toward the machine. "I'll just be taking my property and going peacefully." His left hand dipped into his trouser pocket, emerging with a keyring. One of the keys was entirely unlike the others - it was longer, and thicker, and gleamed silver. Unlike a regular cut-edged key, it was made of a bundle of silvery rods of different lengths, all streamlined back to a bullet end, where the hole for the keyring was. Stepping up to the Pepsi machine, Don thrust this key into its keyhole. There was a momentary pause, then a click, and the front of the machine opened. "Hold it right there!" a voice demanded from behind them. Don turned, looking quite unconcerned, to see a man in a uniform that looked as if it had been made from a giant surplus Canadian flag standing in the doorway to the lab, pointing dramatically. "Hold it yourself, Mac," Don replied. "What's the big idea, swiping my TARDIS? I hope your boffins weren't trying to cancel the void lock. That wouldn't get them in the door, it would cause the TARDIS's internal space to displace North America." James MacDonald Hudson, known when dressed in the flag of Canada as "Guardian", gaped. "Griffin?! You're supposed to be -dead-!" "So are -you-, Mac," Don replied with a pointed look. "I'm assuming you -are- Mac, and not some other guy." "... Uh, well, fair enough," said Guardian. "But you can't just walk in here and - " "I can and I am," Don replied. "I don't have time to argue with you and I -sure- don't have time to visit Fist City with you. You want to know what I need this thing for so urgently, come down to Xavier's in New York tomorrow and find out." Don ushered Jubilee inside the Pepsi machine, then stepped inside himself and slammed the door on Guardian's protest. What lay beyond was a square room, perhaps sixty feet on a side, with twenty-foot-high walls, then a casement for a vaulted dome soaring up to a circular fitting that resembled a skylight. The walls and ceiling were gleaming silver, the floor tiled with alternating silver and black tiles a foot square, their rows at a diagonal to the room. The vertical walls were covered in silvery-white roundels like hubcaps, broken only by the large double doors they'd all entered from, another set in the wall to their right, and another directly opposite them. From the edge of the circular dome casement, four silver "legs", continuations of the four chrome supports reaching up the vaulting of the dome to the skylight, extended down to the floor. They tapered and had holes of diminishing size punched in them, and resembled nothing so much as the landing legs of a spacecraft, as seen in a 1950s movie. Inside these legs, in the exact center of the room, stood a mushroom-shaped control console, its six-sided surface covered in dials, knobs, and chrome levers. In the middle of -that- was a crystalline cylinder within which a cluster of rods of molecular-scale circuitry, suspended between a pair of steel globes at top and bottom, held many of the secrets of time and space. For the Pepsi machine was not a Pepsi machine at all. It was a Type 66 TARDIS, a product of Time Lord technology - a mobile time and space laboratory, theoretically capable of going to any point in four dimensions. Its interior occupied a hyperdimensional pocket space of incalculable size, all tucked neatly within a shape-shifting, indestructible outer shell by its dimensional stabilizer. Near the control console, outside the "landing legs", there was a conversational grouping of comfortable-looking black leather couches and chairs, arranged around a gleaming chrome-tubing-and-glass coffee table with some magazines scattered on it. The rest of the chamber was cluttered with crowded chrome bookshelves, loose books, torchiere lamps, and a large empty space about the size of a car. The room should have been lit with the comforting gold glow of standby illumination, and full of a similarly comforting, almost subliminal, hum. It should have been a comfortable sixty-eight degrees Fahrenheit. Instead, it was eerily silent, rather cold, and gloomy, lit only by a faint, washed-out gray light filtering down from the peak of the dome, like an exterior room whose windows look out on an overcast afternoon sky. Don's shoes clicked hollowly against the floor as he crossed to the control console. Don walked halfway around the console, flipped a few switches, examined a small readout that glowed fitfully to life as a result, then turned a few large knife-pointed dials. As he swung the last one into battery, a fat blue spark jumped out, and one of the console's six panels of indicators and dials lit up, though the column in the center remained dark. Don frowned and examined the text resultantly displayed on a large monitor, one of several suspended by pantograph platforms from the dome casement. ! WARNING ! MAIN POWER >>UNAVAILABLE<< AUXILIARY BUS 95% DEPLETED "Cut off from the Eye of Harmony," he mused. "She was right... " "That's bad, huh," said Jubilee. "Yeah," Don replied, flicking some switches. "But probably not insurmountable." He threw a few more switches. "The boys outside were throwing a lot of energy around trying to get into this thing, and Department H as a whole uses a -tremendous- amount of power to fuel all the nefarious goings-on they get up to. If I can convince the TARDIS to draw on that, I should be able to recharge the auxiliary bus enough to get us to Westchester." He dialed a few knobs, pressed some switches, and smiled. "Here goes nothing," he said, and pulled a big knife switch. There was a hard CLUNK from somewhere under their feet. The emergency lights dimmed slightly, and then with a rush everything lit up bright and shining, and the rest of the displays, readouts and indicators that made up the TARDIS's control console flared into life. The hum, though, was still silent; for it was the subliminal hum of the Eye of Harmony, a source with which the TARDIS still had no contact. ! WARNING ! MAIN POWER >>UNAVAILABLE<< AUXILIARY BUS FULLY CHARGED said the monitor display. Don grinned, went to one of the other panels and started throwing more switches. Then he seemed to think of something; he pressed another control. In the empty space that appeared to be about the size of a car, a shimmering, gridded light show similar to the Telephonic Translocator effect flickered into life, and when it faded, the Cord was parked there, translocated in from its parking space in front of the Department H building. "There, I think that should be everything," said Don, adjusting the last few controls. "We won't be able to move in time at all until I can re-link with the Eye of Harmony, but a short space-only hop like the one to Xavier's shouldn't be a problem even for the aux bus. The only reason the aux bus was depleted was because those idiots kept attacking the TARDIS, forcing the emergency defense system to short-hop it out of harm's way." He smiled. "They must have had to chase it all over the damn building," he added, then pressed the master dematerializer. The column in the center of the control podium lit up with blue fire as lightning arced between the two steel balls, and then the column began moving up and down to the rhythmic accompaniment of the sizzling Jacob's-ladder sound of the pulsing arc within it. With every erg of power sucked out of the Department H building's systems by the TARDIS's voracious recharge, only Guardian, with his super-suit's night-vision optics, saw the Pepsi machine disappear from the middle of Lab A-43-D with a sound like an arc welder. "Tomorrow," he murmured thoughtfully. "Hmm... " The others back at the Xavier Institute hadn't been idle while they were gone. When the TARDIS materialized in the front hall of the mansion and Don and Jubilee emerged, they found the place bustling with people, many of them looking uncertain, concerned, or outright worried. "Hello, everyone, please, no applause," said Don as he led the way out and left the door open. "Too much to do and not enough time to do it. Professor, can I have a word?" Don and Xavier moved off into a corner, and then Don crouched next to the Professor's wheelchair and the two bowed their heads in murmured conversation. Near the stairs, Scott Summers, Professor Xavier's first student, folded his arms and frowned. "I hate the way he does that," he said to the redheaded woman next to him. "Does what?" Jean Grey-Summers replied. "Marches around like he owns the place," Summers complained. "'No applause'." He snorted. "How do we even know he's who he claims to be? Has the Professor scanned him? Have you?" "It wouldn't prove anything if we did," Jean replied, shrugging. "Don's immune to telepathy, you know that." "Yeah. Convenient." "Oh, Scott... " Jean sighed. "Are you -ever- going to forgive him?" Summers regarded his wife's rather sad face through the scarlet tint of his ruby-quartz glasses, then sighed, his shoulders drooping a little. "I don't know, Jean," he replied honestly. "I want to, but... seeing him again, it makes me just... tense up inside. We were never really -friends-, even before." "I know," Jean replied. "But Rachel really loved him... " Summers clenched a fist and gazed at it. "I know," he said. "And look at him. It's like he doesn't even miss her." "Come on," said Jean, putting a hand on her husband's shoulder. "This place is going to get pretty busy. We've got a lot of preparing to do." An hour or so later, the mansion was starting to take on something of the atmosphere of a party - a rather tense and strained party, admittedly, but a party nonetheless. Students, alumni and associates of the Xavier schools were arriving in ones and twos and small groups, greeting and re-acquainting themselves with old friends now separated from them by life's currents, gathering in ever-changing clusters to discuss whatever was known of the odd events that had prompted this gathering in the first place. People trickled in and out of the TARDIS as it stood, its door propped open, in the front hall. Only four people remained in there pretty much full-time: Don Griffin, who was at one of the control panels tuning and adjusting the vehicle's sensor systems, trying to get a better idea of the current state of the universe; Hank "Beast" McCoy and Kitty Pryde, serving as intellectual springboards for Griffin's running think-aloud; and Jubilee, who had stationed herself on one of the couches and was watching everything that happened at the console with silent absorption. Presently the bing-bong of the mansion's doorbell sounded in the front hall, causing Griffin to look up from his calibrations. "Oh, Jubilation, would you be a dear and get that? It's probably one of the guys I called to give me a hand with this." "Sure, no prob," said Jubilee, and she jumped up, trotted out to the front door, and swung it wide. She found herself looking at a broad expanse of dark green fabric, stretched wide over a barrel chest. Standing as close as she was to its owner, she had to crane her neck back to look up far enough to see his face, for the man in the doorway was seven feet tall if an inch. That effort was rather futile anyway, since his face was shadowed by the hood of the green cloak he wore, and she couldn't see it. The man reached up with arms sheathed in gray metal armor, servos whirring softly as he moved, and moved back the hood, not removing it, but moving it back enough to remove the shadows from a face masked in iron. "I am Doom," he intoned. Jubilee looked up at him, swallowed, and said, "You sure are." She took a step back, took all of him in, and muttered, "Gosh, you're huge." Behind her, the various X-Men who were still hanging around the front hall reacted with varying levels of shock, dismay and defensive posture to the sudden appearance on their doorstep of the infamous Victor von Doom, former dictator of Latveria and occasional would-be world conqueror. Logan bounded up from the armchair near the hallway he'd been inhabiting for the past several hours and declared, "You picked the wrong night to come to -this- place lookin' for trouble." "Bah!" said Doom. "Is this how I am greeted when I come as a friend?" He addressed Jubilee, ignoring Logan entirely. "You, girl, you seem to have a civil tongue in your head. Where can I find Donald Griffin?" "Uh, in there," she said, pointing to the TARDIS. "Ah. Of course." He bowed. "Doom thanks you, young lady." Then, still ignoring Logan, the armored figure turned with a sweep of his cloak and entered the TARDIS, Jubilee trotting at his heels. Griffin looked up from his work at the console, grinned, and rounded the control column to grab Doom's armored hand and pump it a couple of times. "Vic! How are you? Good flight from - where are you hanging your cloak these days?" "Germany," Doom rumbled. "The flight was passable. It is good to see you again, Donald. I was under the impression that you had been lost in time." "I was," Don said, "but I got better. Vic, I believe you know Hank McCoy? And of course you know Kitty." "Doctor," said Doom with a slight bow. "It has been some time." Then he turned to Kitty, and something akin to a smile touched the limited facial expressions of his mask as he bowed deeply at the waist. "Miss Pryde. I trust you are well?" Kitty smiled. "Fine, thank you." Kitty was no stranger to Doom; he and Don were, for some strange reason, old friends, and Doom had been instrumental in helping Don save her from total dissolution after her injuries at the hands of a murderer by the name of Harpoon, once upon a very dark time. Some of Don's desperate ardor to save her had rubbed off on Doom, and now the ex-Latverian monarch was always pleased to see her healthy and fit. "We're still waiting for one more, Vic, and then I'll fill you in on what's going down," said Don. "In the meantime -" The doorbell rang again. " - Well, never mind that, then." He went to see who it was himself this time, but Logan got to the door before him. "Wrong house, bub," he said gruffly to the dark-haired, briefcase-carrying man who stood on the doorstep. "We don't need any insurance." "Tony!" said Don. "C'mon in. I don't think you've met Logan. Logan, this is Tony Stark." "Oh," said Logan. "Sorry 'bout that. We've had trouble with uninvited callers." "That's all right," replied Stark distractedly as he stood just inside the threshold and looked around the entrance hall, as if taking it all in. The place had become quite crowded by this time, and most people there still hadn't quite got over the shock of seeing Doctor Doom pop up on the doorstep, so they eyed the newcomer warily as Don ushered him into the TARDIS. Once inside, Don made introductions, such as were necessary; Stark and Hank McCoy were old friends from the Beast's days as an Avenger, and he and Doom... well, they couldn't really be called friends, but they knew each other. Once that was out of the way, Don pulled up a spinning wireframe diagram of a complicated curved shape on one of the pantograph-mounted monitors. Below it was a timer counting down; it currently stood at sixty-one hours, thirty-six minutes, and eight seconds. "This is a very rough model of the current space/time envelope configuration of our universe," he said, pointing to the wireframe; then he pointed to the counter and added, "and this is how long we have before it collapses." "Good God!" said Stark. "How - how sure are you of this data?" "Sure enough," said Don. He explained to them his theory, or rather Rachel's theory, that the universe had split away from the main timestream, and the disastrous consequences inherent in that event. "And we have sixty-one and a half hours," he concluded, "to figure out some way of stopping it from happening." The five of them were still bent over the master console, talking in hushed tones and incomprehensible vocabulary, when Jubilee fell asleep on the couch two hours later. Jubilation Lee awoke from a strange dream of crystalline spires and a strange, unearthly chanting, yawned, stretched, and got up from the couch to look around. The Control Room of Don Griffin's TARDIS looked like a disaster area compared to the way it had been when she'd gone to sleep. A number of the roundels had been removed from the walls, with cables strung this way and that and odd pieces of equipment on scaffolds and stands jacked into the mechanisms behind the walls. A thick cable meandered in through the main door, which was standing open to the outside world, crossed the floor, and vanished into an open panel in the upright of the control column. Two of the pantograph-mounted monitors were pulled around next to each other, facing toward the door. One of them still bore the MAIN POWER UNAVAILABLE warning; the other contained the wireframe envelope diagram and time counter. The timer currently stood at fifty-one hours, twelve minutes, and twenty-nine seconds. The blue-furred shape of the Beast was hanging upside-down from one of the other pantographs, which had been pushed over near a wall; he was up to his shoulders in one of the high roundels, whistling and welding something. There was a large and complicated diagram affixed, upside down, with masking tape to the wall near the double doors leading further into the TARDIS. As Jubilee looked at it, Kitty Pryde leaned partway out of that wall, glanced down to consult the diagram, nodded to herself, and disappeared again. The double doors swung open and Don emerged, dressed in a dirty coverall and work boots, his arms full of unidentifiable equipment. Alongside him rolled Professor Xavier; Jubilee had to swallow a giggle at the sight of the dignified professor in jeans, sweatshirt, and headband, lugging a piece of complicated-looking gear around on his lap. "What we have," Don was saying to the professor, "is a chicken-egg problem. We need to create a Charged Vacuum Emboitment to reconnect what is now a pocket universe to the main spacetime thread. The TARDIS has equipment on board that can do that; the problem is that CVEs have only ever been made -from- the main line -to- pocket universes before. The TARDIS hasn't got enough power to do it without its link to the Eye of Harmony... " "... And you can't re-establish that link until the CVE is made, I see," said Xavier, nodding. "Right. Hence all this improvisation," said Don, gesturing to the mess. "I might be able to get enough power from the New York power grid, if we throw in the power output of my armor, Vic's, and Tony's bodyguard's, to at least -open- a CVE, enough to link up with the Eye of Harmony and get enough power to -stabilize- it. Right now it's the only option I can think of. Of course, it'll black out most of the Eastern Seaboard if it works, but... " "Are you certain that's necessary?" asked Hank McCoy, looking faintly troubled. "I know this is a desperate time, Don, but cutting off the power on that scale would cause a lot of havoc." "Well, no," Don replied, slightly exasperated. "I suppose it isn't strictly necessary. We could always build our -own- 12-exawatt generator. All we'd need would be about a million feet of copper wire and a giant... " Don trailed off, a very thoughtful expression settling onto his face. There was a longish pause, during which he lost everybody's attention, and then he went on in a musing tone, "... a giant -magnet-." Turning, he knelt down next to Xavier's wheelchair and spoke in a hushed tone that would only reach the professor's ears. "Professor, where's your arch-nemesis when we really -need- him?" Xavier blinked at him. "You mean -Erik-?" he replied in the same hushed tone. "Sure," said Don. "He's perfect. The most powerful magnet in the world... we wouldn't even need to power the TARDIS's own vacuum emboitment charger - he could be the core of one himself. All we'd need is an apparatus to spin around him and draw the resulting energies off to the emitter. That's just off the top of my head, from my memory of the Xavier Protocol notes on his power levels - unless they've changed since I was gone?" "If anything, he's become even more powerful," Xavier replied, rather glumly. "But I don't know where he is, and even if I did, why should he help us? Are you -serious-?" "It's not just us he'd be helping. If you told him what was happening, Professor, face to face - or even mind to mind if he'd let you - he'd believe you. He knows you wouldn't lie to him about something like this. Can you find him?" "I don't know," Xavier replied. "I'll try, but I fear it may do more harm than good." "At this point, Professor, the consequences of any failure are kind of a flat scale," said Don wryly. Xavier thought that over for a moment, then nodded, putting a hand on the younger man's shoulder. Don unloaded the equipment from the professor's chair, and he rolled out of the control room to try his luck at communicating with his oldest friend and most persistent enemy. Don stood where he was for a moment, thinking; then he turned to the control console and tapped a switch. "Tony?" "Yes?" the voice of Tony Stark replied from a speaker. "Hold everything - I've got a side project for you. Be down in a minute to run it by you." "I'll be here," Stark replied. Griffin released the switch and seemed to notice Jubilee for the first time. "Oh, good morning, Jubilation." "You know you're the only person who calls me by my full name all the time?" she asked him. "Am I? I'm sorry, does it bother you?" She grinned. "It would if it was anybody else doing it, but you, I'll let it slide." The grin disappeared as she went on, "In the meantime, I got a question about your plan." "What's that?" "ARE YOU OUTTA YOUR FLAMIN' MIND?!" "The suggestion has been made before, thank you, Jubilation," replied Griffin dryly. Jubilee grinned again. "OK," she said agreeably. "Just checking." Then she frowned a bit as something inside her grumbled. "You got anything to eat in this place? I'm starvin'." Don smiled. "Sure," he said, pointing toward the double doors. "Through there, first corridor on the right, second door on your left. Mind you don't get lost - those corridors go on for miles. I'd have to send Logan sniffing on after you." "First right, second door on the left. Got it," Jubilee replied, and off she went. As she left, someone else came in by the main entrance on the opposite wall, a figure so wide he almost had to turn sideway to get through the double door. Griffin turned and grinned. "Benjy!" he said, delighted. "Glad you could make it." He tried to look around the Thing's orange bulk, then gave it up and asked, "Are you alone?" Benjamin J. Grimm nodded ruefully. "Stretcho gotcher message, but he thinks yer exaggeratin', as usual. I came down in case ya needed some help with the heavy liftin'." Griffin sighed. "The one time in my life when Reed Richards could really help me... " he mused rhetorically. Then he brightened and said, "But, as it happens, we'll have no shortage of heavy lifting in a few minutes. Hang here a minute, I'll be right back." Doom studied the hastily scribbled notes Don had left for the interface required between the TARDIS's controls and the device to be built, committing every word to memory instantly. As he read, his mind grasped the basic principles easily, combining his own experiences in time and dimensional travel and his knowledge of Don Griffin's alien-inspired technology. Constructing the components of the interface which were his lot would be child's play; he could probably have done it without any assistance from Griffin, but even Doom had to admit that this method saved time, and time was a most precious commodity at the moment. A loud thump sounded behind Doom, as of something heavy being dropped gently to the lawn. Doom did not jump at the sudden noise; rather, he turned slowly to face seven feet of disgruntled orange rocks. "Th' kid sez you might need these components," the Thing rumbled, "an' that I was ta stick aroun' if yez need help movin' stuff." The tone of the admission said that Benjamin J. Grimm was less than happy playing gofer for the Fantastic Four's deadliest enemy, but that he was putting up with it. "Excellent," Doom said, looking over the dumpster-sized metal bin containing consoles, capacitors, and other heavy equipment scavenged from Don's version of a 'junk drawer'. "It is so refreshing to work with someone competent for a change." The Thing considered this for a moment, then said, "Now I know ya ain't talkin' about me, bucket-breath. What's so special about th' kid?" Suspicion glinted in the tiny blue eyes that peeked out from his outcropped brow. "Ya ain't mebbe usin' him in some kinda scheme ta take over th' world, are ya? 'Cause if ya are, I'm gonna be right here ta put th' kibosh on ya." "Please, Grimm," Doom said scornfully, "please consider for a moment that it is possible for someone to express admiration for the talents of a scientist other than Reed Richards." He picked a couple of large bits of solid-state technology from the bin with no apparent difficulty, continuing, "I merely find it convenient to have an intellect almost on a par with my own working with me on a project. It speeds affairs considerably." "Yeah, right," the Thing said, obviously unconvinced. "I still don't see why you come out here ta help at th' drop of a hat. It jus' don't seem natch'ral." Doom ignored the Thing, using devices contained within his armor's gauntlets to begin soldering new connections and circuits into the spare parts, converting them into the necessary new components. Once the silence grew too uncomfortable for the Thing, he added, "O'course, if y'are on th' level, den I don't say ya should leave or nuttin'. After all, th' las' couple years ya ain't stepped outta line all that much. If th' kid's right," and the Thing looked as much over his shoulder as his mutated form would permit, "den jus' between us, I'd druther have yez on our side helpin' fix things than jus' about anybody I know, 'cept maybe Stretcho." "Doom is touched by your praise," the former dictator said distractedly, focusing his attention on a particularly tricky cut. "Even if it is bundled with your misguided loyalty to that simpleton Richards." "Watch it, pal," the Thing growled. "I still fail to comprehend why you follow that bumbler around as you do," Doom continued. "I have always considered you more sensible than that." "I'm tellin' ya - " The Thing paused in the defense of his best friend, instead asking, "Whaddaya mean by that?" "For all your hotheaded impetuosity, semi-coherent ramblings and rudimentary education," Doom began, ignoring the muttered "chee thanks" from the Thing, "you are an abnormally sensible person. You have a common wisdom which allows you to see things that... that -Richards- is incapable of comprehending." The Thing considered the statement in silence for a moment. He still felt Doom was selling Reed short; on the other hand, he'd lost count of the number of times he or Sue or Johnny had had to drag Mr. Fantastic out of his research trances for dinner, appointments, Galactus, whatever. Finally, he said, "It's like this, Doom; ya gotta stand by your friends. Even when they make mistakes, they're still your friends. Otherwise, what's th' point?" "What indeed?" Doom nodded. "And so you have answered your own question." "I what?" the Thing asked. Doom completed the modification in silence, examining it for flaws or errors, knowing that if he found any they would not be because of his work. Satisfied, he set down the device and looked through the bin for more raw materials. As he looked, he said, "Since you are making your best effort to be tactful, I shall explain to you why I have graced this humble countryside with my presence. It is because... " Doom paused in his movements, staring not so much into the bin as into the past. "It is because Doom owes a debt of honor." The Thing's first reaction was to laugh. In the years Grimm had known him, Doom had broken more pledges, backstabbed more alliances of convenience, and generally been more ruthless and dishonorable than anybody else he'd met east of Yancey Street. The quiet, thoughtful tone of the statement stopped the Thing from laughing, or from making any wisecracks. "There wuz a time, Doom," he said instead, "when a debt of honor wouldn't bother yez very much." "True," Doom agreed. "But Donald Griffin assisted me in an endeavor in which I alone could not succeed; in which I and Stephen Strange, the two greatest sorcerers of our time, could not succeed. He rescued my mother from the very pit of Damnation into which she was exiled so long ago." "Oh," the Thing said, a little abashed. Until now he wouldn't have believed that even Victor von Doom loved his mother. "During our descent into the Pit of Pain," Doom continued, "we had many words, Griffin and I. We discussed the brevity of human life, and how that life is so easily wasted on trivialities. We discussed the morality of power, and how and when it should be applied. In that long, dark descent we learned of ourselves through each other... and when we brought my mother out of that place, the weight lifted from my heart was so great that my hatred for Richards and my desire to impose benevolent order on the chaos which is humanity were reduced to minor issues by comparison. "The people of Latveria have a democratic government and a burgeoning economy after overthrowing my rule. In the past few years I have lent my aid to them from afar, anonymously, and have wrought wonders of science and sorcery alike which no other man shall match in my lifetime." He looked up at the Thing, the wide eyes staring up through the slits of his mask no longer looking as bloodshot and wild as Ben Grimm remembered from past battles. "For all of this, and for my mother's safe return to the mortal plane, I am indebted to Donald Griffin." The moment passed, and Doom stood up, inspecting the chosen piece of hardware carefully. In his normal, imperious voice, he said, "Go inform that noteworthy that Doom shall require some gold filaments for modifications. Also inform him that, with the filaments in hand, I shall be finished with my tasks momentarily." "Righto, Doom..." The Thing paused for a moment, turned back towards Doom, and asked, "Can I call ya 'Vic'?" For the briefest possible moment, Doom seemed taken aback; then self-control reasserted itself, and Doctor Doom said, "Doom shall consider it." It was without a doubt the oddest-looking thing anyone had ever built on a lawn in Westchester County. The biggest piece was the generator, which was a ten-foot-high, ten-foot wide, vaguely cylindrical contraption whose function could be guessed from the enormous coils of copper wire which surrounded most of it. At its base, thick cables ran a few feet to a device which looked like a pile of random electronic junk topped with a thirty-foot radio transmission mast - because that's pretty much what it was. The contraption - a Vacuum Emboitment Charger, to give it its proper name - took four of the most brilliant technologists in the world almost two days to build, working almost non-stop, and when it was complete, with the countdown clock in the TARDIS control room standing at a little more than three hours, it still lacked a single absolutely vital component, without which all the rest was just so much junk piled on the lawn. That component's arrival probably marked the only time anyone was ever happy to see Magneto turn up on the campus of Xavier's School. The Master of Magnetism arrived quietly, without challenge or fanfare. Don wasn't sure how Professor X had reached him or exactly what he'd said, but the X-Men's most dangerous nemesis didn't seem to be looking for a fight. He did eye the gathering which awaited him with some suspicion, though, as he alighted on the grass next to the unwieldy-looking contraption Don and his compatriots had bashed together. Xavier wheeled out to meet him, and the two had a brief conversation none of the others could overhear. By their body language, though, it wasn't going well. Magneto's bearing got stiffer and more indignant while Xavier tried to stay mild but got visibly vehement. Eventually Magneto whirled and stalked away from the wheelchair-bound figure of the professor, striding most of the way to the rest. There he paused and looked them over with his penetrating eyes. None quailed. He paused, looking mildly taken aback, as his gaze passed over Victor von Doom. Then he turned to Xavier, who was rolling up behind him, and said in a cool, angry voice, "This is really beneath you, Charles. To set up so obvious a trap as this," he said, gesturing in disgust at the enormous copper coils, heavy cables, and unidentifiable equipment, "and then expect me to walk into it simply because you called. I'm very disappointed. You've never outright -lied- to me before." "It's no lie, Erik," Xavier said softly. "I don't understand the details of it myself; they're rather outside my sphere of expertise," he added with a wry chuckle. "But I trust Don. I wouldn't have asked you to come here if I didn't believe that what he's saying is the truth." "And what is he saying?" Magneto asked sardonically. He turned to face Griffin. "That the universe is ending." Griffin looked blandly back at him and said, "Yeah. That's what I'm saying." Magneto smiled a cold, thin smile. "You'll forgive me, Dr. Griffin, but I've heard that one before." He turned to go, wondering idly if they would attack him, but before he'd taken two steps toward the pile of equipment - for he intended to wreck it on his way out as a gesture of his contempt - the universe turned inside-out. If the whole universe were in the back of a a van, and the van ran into a bridge abutment at 65 miles an hour, that would be pretty much what happened next. As Griffin picked himself up off the ground, the clinical part of his mind remarked to the rest of him how rapidly the situation had degenerated. One moment it was a pleasant early evening in Westchester County; the next, the sky had turned a poisonous shade of dull, angry orange and a dry, hot wind was howling across the campus. The timeshock had knocked Magneto down too, and as he got to his feet, he turned to face the Time Lord. The look in his eyes had changed. Behind Magneto, through the open door of his TARDIS (which had been moved by the Thing out to the lawn and now stood next to the control console of the ungainly machine), came the sound of a low, baleful bell. The sound chilled the hearts of all present, even the hard heart of the Master of Magnetism - which was its purpose. "What's that sound?" Jubilee yelled over the wind into Griffin's ear. Kitty Pryde and Kurt Wagner, who had arrived with Peter Rasputin from Muir Isle in the early stages of the construction, glanced at each other with eyes full of dread. Unlike Jubilee, they'd heard it before, and so what Griffin bawled back was only confirmation. "It's the Cloister Bell!" "What's that mean?" Jubilee replied. Griffin shoved his sleeve back and consulted his watch, which was slaved to the master display in the TARDIS control room. What he saw there was not encouraging. "It means we're running out of time," he replied, almost too quietly to be heard over the wind. Then he turned to Magneto and showed him the watch. The time-remaining display was still there, but now it was counting down much faster, the unspooling of its seconds counter coming much faster than one second per second. "Now do you believe me?" Griffin bellowed. Magneto gazed at him for a few moments, then nodded. "What must I do?" he asked. With Magneto at its core, the ungainly contraption of copper and steel next to the pile of electronic gear became the most powerful electrical generator in the world, and the silvery glow that surrounded it as it whirled and crackled and generated its incredible power added a surreal, sharp-shadowed overlay to the sickly orange light of the end of the world. Griffin stood in his powered armor at the control console on the far side of the pile of kitbashed gear, hands on the control levers, his face invisible behind the reflective dome of his helmet's facebowl. His armor was connected to the console with thick cables. So, too, were the armored suits of Doom, on his left, and Iron Man, on his right. Inside his helmet, Don kept one eye on the TARDIS time counter, which was unrolling faster and faster, and the other on the power flux levels building up inside the Vacuum Emboitment Charger. "This is going to be very close," he murmured to himself. "Magneto - we're still falling a little short on power level. Is there any more you can do?" No response; the Master of Magnetism had no attention to spare for communications, which meant the answer to Griffin's question was "No." He ramped the output levels of his suit's internal fusion reactor up to 115%; the overload alarm keening in his helmet overlaid the sizzling roar of the generator and the still-audible booming of the Cloister Bell. The masked faces of his two armored allies betrayed nothing, but he knew they were pushing their own suits to the limit as well... ... and it wasn't quite enough. "Well," he murmured to himself, "we tried - " The power level jumped that last little bit, surging into the green zone. Griffin blinked, looked to his left, then to his right, and there on the far side of Iron Man, surrounded by a crackling nimbus of energy with a pair of feed cables in his hands, was Guardian. "Mac!" said Griffin. "I thought you weren't coming." "And miss the end of time?" Guardian replied. "Are you kidding?" "Well, I'm damn glad to have you," Griffin said. "Everybody stand by - initiating first-phase emboitment creation... now." The tall metal spire atop the console glowed, pulsed, and then fired a beam of jagged white light into the orange sky. "Emboitment created," said Don. He slid one of the power levers back; now that the hard work of creating the emboitment was over, the rest could be accomplished with just the power Magneto could generate. In fact, in a moment, Don could even let him know it was safe to relax a little. "Now stabilizing - WHAT the... " In the corner of his display, the wireframe diagram of the universe surmounting the time display rippled and began to collapse rapidly. "Christ!" Don blurted. "The emboitment's destabilized what's left of the time-space matrix!" He yanked the cables from his suit's power pack and turned to Doom. "Vic - take over! I'm going to see if I can bring the TARDIS's own dimensional manipulator array online and stabilize this mess." A moment later, the console sparked, sizzled, and then caught fire. "OK, new plan," said Don, backing away from the console. "EVERYBODY INTO THE TARDIS!" he roared, his armor's PA system amping his voice over all the ambient noise, and then he led the way inside. So they ran, as only experienced adventurers can run, for the Pepsi machine. There was a sense of urgency, but no panic; they were all much too disciplined for that. There was no jostling as the group bottlenecked down at the entrance to the machine. Griffin, his armor dismissed, stood at the TARDIS's control console and paid the influx of friends no mind. The lines of his face were hard and tight as he ran practiced hands over the controls of the machine. Still cut off from the Eye of Harmony, it lacked anything like its true power, but all the same, he was hoping that its built-in dimensional manipulators would be able to give the unstable new emboitment the nudge it needed to stabilize. The problem was that they were doing this inside out. He had suspected that might cause difficulties, but there hadn't been much choice other than to try it - but a CVE was supposed to be created from the mainline out to a pocket, not the other way around, and the kitbashed equipment's unsuitability was showing. While he worked feverishly to back up the failing emboitment charger's efforts, the evacuation was proceeding nicely - - until, with a sudden, startling abruptness, the TARDIS door shut firmly in the face of the next person in line. "Hey, what the - ?" blurted Scott Summers. Before he could raise a hand to bang on the door, though, there came a distinctive electrical noise, and the machine faded away and disappeared. Turning a look of mingled astonishment and anger to Guardian, who still stood next to the console providing what help he could to the power source, Cyclops said, "He took off!" Guardian shook his head and switched his suit's comm system to public-address. Griffin's voice crackled out of it, washed in static but still recognizable: "... TARDIS's crisis management syst... auto-dematerialized... no override... think I know what I have to do now... be back shortly... n't panic." "I hope he knows what he's doing," Cyclops murmured, looking up at the sputtering spire of white energy still stabbing into the baleful orange sky. "OK, everyone, hang on," Griffin said, gripping the edges of the control console to remain upright as the deck jumped beneath his feet. "I know what I have to do now. I'm taking her into the CVE." "The unstable one that's about to suck the whole universe through it into God knows where?" Jubilee inquired. "That's the one," Griffin replied with a tight grin. "Hold on tight, 'cause here we go!" With a tremendous crash, the whole hyperdimensional structure of the TARDIS heaved and shuddered, throwing everyone who wasn't already down to the floor except Griffin, who maintained his white-knuckled grip on the console. The lights went out, leaving the control room only illuminated by the glow of the console and monitors. The shuddering and banging made it almost impossible to see or hear the controls, but Don Griffin was an exceptional TARDIS operator even among Time Lords, and he knew this old Type 66 like the back of his hand. He didn't need to see them as long as he knew what face of the panel he was on. Not for the first time, some idle part of his mind considered adding a seat or two to this thing; a circular track, or a rotating arm from the pedestal that supported the console, would do nicely for that. He made his way from one side to the other, making sure not to grab and activate other controls in his search for handholds, and expertly manipulated the straining time machine's drive systems as it tumbled through the mathematical chaos of the unstable CVE. "If you don't mind my asking," Kitty Pryde yelled at him over the cacophony and the still-pealing Cloister Bell, "what is this supposed to accomplish?" "Well," Don replied without taking his eyes or hands off the control panels, "IF the emboitment has really punched all the way through to another plane, and IF that plane is connected to the mainline and not just another dead-end demiplane, and IF we can get across the midpoint threshold without breaking up, then the TARDIS should be able to re-establish contact with - " The lights came back on, blazing brighter than they had before, and from somewhere under everyone's feet came a low, uneven rumble that ascended swiftly to a smooth, almost subliminal hum. The sound was remarkably reassuring, even though it was nearly drowned by the continued crashing and juddering, and a huge smile split Griffin's face as he heard it. " - the Eye of Harmony!" he concluded, rounding the console and starting to work on the dimensional engineering array. "Now, with full power in hand, I should be able to stabilize this bloody - " He never got to finish the sentence, for just then the TARDIS hit the biggest "bump" yet in the CVE's unspace continuum, an ephemeral impact that twisted the machine's interior space on its side for an instant and nearly put the re-energized lights out again. It hurled most of the ship's impromptu company to the floor. Don it hurled face-first into the console with a sickening CRACK. He rebounded, his whole body instantly limp like a rag doll, and crashed down on his back to the deck, immediately sliding toward the sealed exit doors and leaving a smear of blood behind him, brightly vivid on the white parts of the floor. "DON!" cried Kitty, springing to his side, but Logan was already there. Victor von Doom had long considered himself a man of destiny. In his time, he had himself constructed time machines, dimensional engineering devices, and the like; he had even perfected a primitive form of void locking, centuries, perhaps millennia ahead of the technological development curve the Time Lords expected of his species. He had watched Don Griffin operate this wondrous machine several times. Early in their acquaintanceship, he had even tried to take it for himself, only to be defeated - and even a bit humbled! - by the ways it had of defending itself. Now he stepped to the console without hesitation, ignoring the blood on the dials and the thunder of the ship's increasingly unstable path through the CVE, and set to work, his armored body braced like a statue against the shuddering of the deck. Behind him, he heard Logan say softly, "His neck's broken," and somebody else sobbing. Doom did not react; he was too busy. His only concession to the dreadfulness of the situation was to turn to the other armored figure in the room and say on a private radio band, "I know you are Stark himself, and not some hired lackey. You may possess intellect enough to be of use in this matter. Go to the navigational controls and see if you can stabilize this machine." Iron Man stiffened slightly - he had always been under the impression that Doom hadn't remembered the trip to the future during which he'd looked up the fact that Anthony Stark had been his own armored bodyguard. He made no demur, though, under the circumstances; instead he did as he was asked. Stark lacked the experience Doom had, never having tried to hijack a TARDIS, but he was a genius with machinery and a very quick study. His efforts were inexpert, but he at least judged the functions of the controls correctly, and prevented the TARDIS from spinning right out of the CVE and into whatever universe lay beyond. Doom worked the controls of the dimensional manipulator array, noting as he did that it wasn't too different, if much more refined, from the version that he had created some years before. As he worked, and watched the results on the status monitor, he privately wondered if his lack of experience in grand-scale dimensional engineering was the reason why the task appeared hopeless, or perhaps it truly was. The CVE, no longer expanding uncontrollably, was now collapsing. If it did, it would leave their universe in the same predicament as before, consuming itself in a vastly accelerated process of entropy as the very boundaries of space-time itself shrank to a pinpoint. A trained dimensional engineer like Don would have approached that problem by subtly altering the field parameters of the TARDIS, strengthening the charge of the CVE and eventually freezing it in place, but that approach probably would have failed here, where the CVE was so unstable and the time available so limited. Doom, being untrained, thought of something radically different, which no trained engineer would have thought of, let alone considered feasible. Believing the problem to be the inherent imbalance in energy levels between the mainline and the pocket universe they'd just come from, he concluded that the solution was to seal the pocket off completely. With the utter unhesitation of a man who knows that he is meant for greatness, he pushed the DMA's power output to maximum and twisted the CVE over on itself. The only problem was, the TARDIS was on the wrong side. Doom didn't think this would be a problem, since it was his impression that, when he broke the mainline end off, twisted it back and reconnected it to the pocket, the chronal flow through the loop would both stabilize the pocket dimension indefinitely and propel the TARDIS back inside. He was half right. As the lights went out again and reality seemed to stretch to an agonizing thinness, Doom found himself realistically considering the possibility that he had erred. Intolerable, he thought, and then everything went black. Don Griffin climbed slowly up out of an abyss of darkness, cold, and pain for the second time that week. When he opened his eyes, darkness was still what he saw, but it was darkness cut by a dull electric glow and some colored points of light, so he knew he wasn't blind. He sat up carefully, feeling at his limbs for damage, and was mildly surprised to find none - surprised, that is, until he was assailed by a peculiar light-headedness, accompanied by an odd buzzing feeling in his head. It was a sensation he'd felt once before, in that horrid New York of the future, and it told him that he had been damaged, and badly, too. Thanks to one of the more miraculous quirks of having become a Time Lord, though, he didn't feel any the worse for it. In fact, he noted wryly as he got to his feet and went to the control console, he felt quite a new man. The next one to come to was, unsurprisingly, the Thing; as Don moved toward the console, he heard his friend's gravelly voice mutter, "Aw, my achin' head. Did anybody get th' number o'that truck?" Don chuckled but didn't reply as stepped over the prone form of Doom and consulted the status monitor. This blandly informed him that the TARDIS had suffered a High-Energy Event, which was the Time Lords' euphemistically understated code for a massive power surge. It had cut the main breakers out and left the machine idling, dematerialized, on emergency power again. The subliminal hum was still there, though; wherever they were, they were still connected to the Eye of Harmony. He thumbed the main power back online, and without hesitation the systems powered up and the lights came back on. Griffin stepped back from the console and took in the shambles of his control room as scattered people began to stir and mumble. Grimm was sitting in the far corner, his head cradled in one massive hand, still looking a bit bleary. He wasn't used to being knocked out, but then, it had been a while since he last rode a dimensional crossrip. Getting brought down by one of those wasn't a purely physical phenomenon. Kitty was the next to recover. She sat up, looked around, and saw Don; her eyes went wide, and he wondered what he looked like. His clothes still more or less fit, but he could see from the way his sleeves didn't quite come to his hands that he must have gotten a bit taller. That didn't have any bearing on what might have happened to his face, though. The first time he'd regenerated, he'd pretty much stayed himself, except for another slight increase in height and the darkening of his hair from sandy to dark brown. This time, who knew? There were no mirrors in the control room... ... but Kitty, with relief all over her face, picked her way over the sprawled form of the former Latverian dictator and embraced Griffin without hesitation, so he figured she must at least have been able to deduce who he was. "How do I look?" he asked wryly as he returned the embrace. She tilted her head back and grinned. "Same as you ever did," she said, "except you're a little taller and your hair's gone black." She ran a hand through the aforesaid hair, ruffling it, and then stepped back and nodded. "You must be slowly evolving into Alec Baldwin," she said wryly. Griffin sighed resignedly. "I guess there are worse fates. You want to see how the others are coming along? I have to try and figure out where the hell we are." That process took about half an hour, during which time his impromptu passengers regained consciousness and gathered in an anxious group to watch him work. After consulting with Doom and Iron Man on what had happened after he'd been taken out, Griffin worked alone, mostly at the DMA console, for twenty minutes before turning to the others, his face grave. As he did, he finally took stock of all those he had dragged along, all those who had made it to the presumed safety of the TARDIS before the emergency cycle had closed the door and dematerialized the vehicle. He'd known about Kitty, and Ben Grimm; he'd had to step over both Vic and Tony to get to the control console. He remembered talking to Jubilee during the crisis. Now he saw that Piotr Rasputin and Kurt Wagner had made it aboard as well. So had Logan and Hank McCoy. Ten refugees, but having consulted the console, Griffin knew it could have been worse. They could have been ten survivors. "I've set the TARDIS to take us to the nearest major human settlement," he said. "We should be able to get our bearings there... and then I'll start working on what we do next. In the meantime, I have good news, and I have bad news." "Well," said the Thing, "don't keep us in suspense." "OK. Good news, we did it. Our home universe is now a stable, self-contained pocket. Vic, I don't know where you got the idea to twist the CVE back on itself, but it was the right call; the feedback loop should sustain the pocket indefinitely." Doom inclined his head, acknowledging the compliment, and said grimly, "But?" "But," Don conceded, "when the CVE sealed off, we ended up on the wrong side. Hear the hum? We're still connected to the Eye of Harmony. We're in the mainline... " He paused, then pushed on, "... and I don't think we can get back." That got the response he'd been expecting, which was everybody in the room blurting, "WHAT?" "To get into a sealed pocket universe, we'd have to create another CVE, one linking the pocket back to the mainline again," he explained. "And I think you may remember what a good idea that was -last- time... I don't know for sure, I'll have to study it for a while, but right now I believe we're stuck here." There was a silent pause while that sunk in. Then Jubilee said hesitantly, "Do... do the others have any idea that we're alive?" To her surprise, Don smiled. "I think so," he said. "The TARDIS computer logs show that the central computer dispatched a message to the system at Xavier's just before we crossed the threshold. I'd programmed it to do that years ago, for a different reason, and forgotten to disable the program afterward... the message might confuse a few people," he added with a chuckle, "but I think the Professor will get the idea... " A profound silence had settled over the campus of Xavier's School after the orange sky had suddenly flared white and then returned, as though a switch had been thrown, to its normal star-speckled night black. Those left behind when the TARDIS had dematerialized stood on the lawn next to the scattered wreckage of the generator, which had lost structural integrity shortly after the console blew up. They stood and looked up at the suddenly normalized sky, wondering. "It would appear," said a scuffed and battered Magneto thoughtfully, "that our efforts have been successful." Charles Xavier nodded thoughtfully, his eyes turned not toward the sky but to the place where the TARDIS had stood. "Do you think they made it?" asked Jean Grey. "I don't know, Jean," said the professor. "We can hope... " His wristwatch chimed, informing him of a message just received by the compound's central computer. Slightly quizzical, he pushed back his sleeve and looked at it. For a moment, Xavier seemed immensely puzzled; then, with a look of comprehension, he smiled, a bit sadly. "What is it, Professor?" asked Cyclops. Silently, Xavier showed him the watch. Scrolling across its tiny text display field was the repeating message, "ALL THESE WORLDS ARE YOURS EXCEPT EUROPA... " Summers too looked puzzled, so the professor explained it, sort of. "If I'm interpreting this message correctly," he said, "they made it... but we won't be seeing them again for a while." Cyclops nodded pensively, but did not reply. Next to him, Jean was looking up at the sky, her expression a bit wistful. Xavier let them be and turned to Magneto. "So, Erik," he said quietly. "You've helped save the world. How do you feel?" Magneto turned to regard the professor for a moment, and then, to Xavier's surprise, took off his helmet and smiled as a cool evening breeze ruffled his silver hair. "I feel tired, Charles," he said wryly. Magneto wasn't alone. After the stress of a regeneration, a Time Lord was supposed to take things easy for a few days. Don Griffin didn't have a few days, but, once he'd made sure the TARDIS was on course to its programmed destination, he'd excused himself from the rather shocked group in the control room and headed for the one place of total rest aboard the timeship. Kitty watched him leave the control room; more than the others, she recognized the slump in his shoulders and the drag in his step. While the others discussed their situation animatedly, she slipped quietly away, following him through the TARDIS's corridors until he went into a room off one of the side hallways. She hesitated at the slightly-ajar door of that room, torn between her impulse to follow and help and her reluctance to intrude; then his voice came softly through the small opening. "It's OK, Kitty. I know you followed me. Come on in." She did so, closing the door behind her, and then looked around her in awe. The room itself wasn't very impressive. It was maybe thirty feet by ten, entirely unfurnished, its roundeled walls (and smooth ceiling and floor) a soothing shade of blue... but with the door closed, it also contained an incredible sense of peace and lassitude, a silence so profound it almost hurt. Kitty had never felt anything like it. "Wha - ?" she said, then cut herself off - in the peace of the room, her voice sounded harsh and unwelcome. "It's called the Zero Room," Don replied softly. "It's shielded from every form of noise - audible, spatial, temporal, psionic... a place of perfect peace and rest. It's supposed to be the optimal environment for a Time Lord to regenerate in, though I normally just use it when I feel like things are closing in on me." "I'm sorry... I'll go," she said. "It's all right," he replied, sitting back, then lying down, on nothing at all. "You can stay if you're quiet. Maybe the sense of a little company will be better for me than total solitude, anyway." Gingerly, she made as if to sit - and the Zero Room accommodated her, supporting her without pressure in a way that furniture could not. It was perfectly relaxing - and yet she felt no urge to sleep. Other rooms were for sleeping. The Zero Room was for meditation. Kitty didn't know or care how long they spent there, in the quiet blue peace of the Zero Room. Nothing was said. Nothing much was even thought. Eventually, Don sat up, then stood, and sighed clear down to his shoes. "We'll be wherever we're headed soon," he said. "I suppose I'd better put on some more presentable clothes and see how everyone's holding up." "All right, everyone," said Don ten minutes later. He'd changed into traveling clothes, rugged and neutral in color and style, and he stood at the TARDIS console with his hand on the master door activator. "Be on your guard; the environment is Class M and the place seems hospitable enough, but we don't really know what we're walking into." Then he pulled the lever and led the way outside, and they walked into... ... a very pleasant, grassy, tree-lined park. Beyond the park lay a city, and -what- a city, with tall, gleaming Art Deco spires and a host of airships plying a maze of aerial streets between the ground and the fluffy white clouds in the bright blue sky. It was a beautiful day; it felt like spring. People were walking dogs. They only paused to take cursory notice of the people, some of them quite outlandish-looking, emerging from the vending machine which had appeared next to the equestrian statue in the middle of the park. As they stood and tried to get their heads around where they were, a blue-uniformed policeman came briskly up the pink-graveled path and paused before them, smiling. "Afternoon," he said. "I'm Sergeant Schweickart. Do you folks need any help? You look a little lost." Then, addressing Doom and Iron Man, he said, "We have some restrictions about powered combat armor here, fellas - I'm gonna have to ask you to power down your weapons arrays if you haven't already." "Indeed," said Doom, slightly dubiously. "They already are, Officer," said Iron Man, sounding faintly disbelieving. Schweickart nodded, smiling. "Good, thanks. We like to keep our city as quiet as possible. Would you folks mind telling me where you come from?" Griffin (who, having noticed that it was still in the form of a Pepsi machine and really didn't look very different at all, had been inspecting his TARDIS with great puzzlement) turned around to face the officer. What the hell, he thought to himself, this guy sounds pretty centered... "We're dimensional travelers," he said. "We've just been stranded." The cop blinked in momentary disbelief, but then it passed. It had apparently been for some reason other than what Griffin had said, though, because the next thing he did was to key a small device affixed to the back of his hand and speak into it: "Central, this is Schweickart, 774J. I've got a group in Veterans Park who say they're DDPs. Can you get IPO to send down an orientation team?" "10-4, Russ. We'll get 'em on the horn right away. Any special notes?" "Looks like seven humans, a Daemon... maybe a Roklar... and I dunno what the blue guy is. Two of the humans in powered armor. They're not giving me any trouble; they seem more confused than anything else. Oh - and one of 'em looks like a DC for the First Lensman." "Roger that. I'll pass that along. Stand by." There was a pause while the dispatcher spoke on another circuit; then she came back and said, "OK, Russ, they're on their way. The First Lensman is coming down himself, so make sure your shirt's tucked in." "10-4, Central," said Schweickart with a grin. "I'll be here." He tabbed the link off, then turned his smile back to the TARDIS group. "If you folks will just wait here for a few minutes," he said, "someone's coming down to take you in hand and see about getting you oriented. There'll be some paperwork and a few scans, but nothing too outrageous." He drew himself up, his friendly smile widening, and added, "In the meantime, let me be the first to say:" He gestured with one hand to the towering golden city behind him. "Welcome to New Avalon!" /* Joe Satriani "Devil's Slide" _Engines of Creation_ */ EYRIE PRODUCTIONS, UNLIMITED presented a WAYBACK MACHINE production an UNFINISHED BUSINESS film EYRIE PRODUCTIONS DESTROYS THE MARVEL UNIVERSE starring Donald E. Griffin with the uncanny X-MEN Prof. Charles Xavier James MacDonald Hudson Victor von Doom Anthony Stark Benjamin J. Grimm Erik Magnus Lensherr Sgt. Russell Schweickart, NAPD and featuring Security Division, Department H with thanks to Marvel Comics (even if I did riff on them mercilessly throughout) Directed by Benjamin D. Hutchins Second Unit Director Kris Overstreet "If" by Rudyard Kipling With the kibitzing and support of the Eyrie Productions Usual Suspects With fond reminiscences of The Guardians of Vacationland: Joseph H. Martin, Jr. (Creator of "Detians-413"!) Mike Shaw Cory Yost E P U (colour) 2003