Metastasis

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PHASE 1

Metastasis
Dates run:	September 5, 2009
Run By:	Alicia
Read the logs:	Metastasis

Quote from the plot

Teaser.

Cast

This should be the characters directly involved with the bulk of the action.

List of character links, separated with commas - [[Character A]], [[Character B]] etc.

List of NPC/Villain links.

Timing

September 5, 2009

Plot Summary

Charles receives a desperate-sounding phone call from Henry Pym, of all people; he claims to be in New York, that someone is following him, and that he needs to talk to Charles about a mutant-related threat he won't discuss over the phone. What he wants is an escort to the mansion. Zanne is already in New York that afternoon, as is Scott (separately, with Jean-Paul), and Charles contacts the three of them to inform them of the situation and ask them to pick up Pym.

At Pym's hotel, they find not the scientist but a four-man SHIELD team, led by an agent who introduces herself as Barbara Morse and tells them that she's there to take Pym into custody. Scott explains about the phone call to Charles, but Morse is suspicious and insists on taking them in for questioning. While the conversation is going on, her team is searching the hotel room from top to bottom. One finds a small cylinder of mottled yellow metal in the room's mini-fridge. Removing it to get a closer look, his skin catches on what seems to be a sharp edge. He starts yelling that it's moving, digging deeper into his hand. As two of his teammates move to help him, he goes from panicked to blank in an instant, draws his sidearm, and shoots both of them. Scott blasts the man before he can fire again, but it doesn't knock him down. The metal of the cylinder now looks like it's molded itself to his hand, and beneath his clothes, the flesh of his arm is rippling. He bowls over Morse to get to the door, and makes a run for the staircase.

The two X-Men and Jean-Paul go after him, despite Morse's protest, leaving her to call for help for her two downed men. Scott contacts Charles, who traces the man down into the subway with some difficulty - there's something 'off' about his mental imprint. They manage to follow him to an abandoned level in one of the nearby subway stations, where they're surprised to find a small but high-tech medical storage facility. Inside, the SHIELD officer is lying unconscious on the floor in front of a refrigeration unit, bleeding profusely from lacerations to his hand and arm. The door to the unit is visibly damaged.

They move him to a nearby table to try and tend his injuries, then open the refrigeration unit. Inside is a mass of the same yellowish metal. It looks organic, and everything else inside the unit - shelves, other equipment, samples - is wrapped in metallic 'spiderwebs'. The mass reacts aggressively to the open door, and while Scott's blast has little effect on it, Zanne's freeze does, allowing them to get the door closed again.

Charles is still in contact telepathically (although their cell phones are not working this far underground). He tells them he's alerted Agent Morse to their location, then reveals that he is getting a psi-imprint from the metal mass in the fridge. There is enough of a rudimentary awareness there to suggest that 'it' may in fact be a mutant. He tries to make deeper contact, only to get a range of confused, disturbing impressions of pain, images of what seem to be medical experiments that would be more correctly defined as torture. The contact is clearly stunning, and he loses the link with Scott and the others. As they're waiting, hoping that he'll reestablish contact - and getting increasingly uneasy at the banging sounds from the fridge - Zanne thinks to try and bring up a retrocognitive projection.

What's revealed is horrendous; at some point in the fairly recent past, several armed men entered the facility and were literally torn to pieces by the being inside the refrigeration unit. Zanne fast-forwards and catches a glimpse of the clean-up crew, including Pym, who seemed to have been supervising (when he wasn't throwing up his breakfast in the corner).

While they're still processing what's been revealed, Morse arrives with reinforcements, who apparently arrived at the hotel just as the paramedics did. As the new agents fan out to search the storage facility, Morse concedes (grudgingly) that Charles's directions were helpful, and thanks them for helping her agent. Zanne reveals what she saw, at which point, one of the newcomers thanks her and the four "agents" turn on Morse, Jean-Paul, and the two X-Men. One of them knocks out Zanne and Jean-Paul with a neural shock, while another grabs Morse to use her as a human shield. The other two open the refrigeration unit, and one uses pyrokinesis on the being inside. The one holding Morse tells her and Scott that they're doing everyone a favor and that it's not a person, "just a copy".

Morse proceeds to free herself, kicking her would-be captor's ass quite handily, while Scott blasts the pyrokinetic away from the refrigeration unit. The fourth man advances on him, but is taken down by a quickly-recovering Jean-Paul, while Zanne freezes the neural shock-generator in place. Charles, getting back in touch at a timely moment, promises to alert Fury directly and thus circumvent whoever sent out a team of fake agents in response to Morse's call for help. When the real backup arrives, the four imposter agents are taken into custody. Morse doesn't insist on taking Scott and the other two for questioning after all, pointing out that she knows where to find them if necessary. The being in the refrigeration unit, badly charred, is no longer moving, and Charles reveals that the awareness that had been there is gone. They're left with a number of questions, none of which Morse is feeling quite grateful enough to answer.

Mon

Metastasis: While visiting a music store in the city with Jean-Paul, Scott receives a call from Professor Xavier who informs him that his old acquaintance Henry Pym got in touch asking for help and using the phrase 'new mutant threat', which has Scott and Jean-Paul agreeing to meet the man at a hotel in the city; they meet Zanne at the hotel (as well as a SHIELD team rather than Pym, currently fleeing the authorities who want to speak to him) and one of the SHIELD agents, Royce, cuts himself on a canister he finds in the fridge, which envelops his arm and makes him shoot two agents before he takes off and sends the X-Men chasing after him; in the subway they find chaos in the wake of Royce's attacks and pursue him deeper underground to a poorly equipped lab structure; Zanne traps the metal thing that had attached itself to Royce in a freeze; when Scott links with the Professor he is informed that the metal thing has a mind and Zanne uses a retrocognitive projection to discover that the thing killed men at the lab when they took it out of its container and that Pym was involved in getting it contained again; Agent Morse of SHIELD arrives to play clean up but four mutants arrive shortly after and use pyrokinetics to kill the metal thing before the X-Men and SHIELD attack them and Morse makes some arrests; Scott posts to the x-team comm to tell them his report is in the database and that he is going to Harry's with Zanne and Jean-Paul; they get drunk and lament over SHIELD's lack of information for them, the treatment of the creature, and the fact that the thing was apparently only a copy and thus the mystery remains unsolved.

Related Links

Links to things/concepts/locations that arose for the first time in the game during the plot. Eg. The Neutraliser, Nova Roma, etc.

External Links

Metastasis

Trivia and Meta

Meta

Alicia