Issue 1 Downtime

The man Theresa and Nick had subdued is in a cell, still unconscious. By now part of his shoulders has disappeared. He's hooked up to a bunch of medical equipment that is monitoring his condition. He is stable according to the standard medical tests, which is why people from Muir are on route.

Theresa leaned against one of the walls, keeping an eye on him. She seemed to feel at least a little responsible for him. Her eyes glowed green as she tried to analyze how this man was connected to life, the universe, and everything. Not that anyone would buy the weather witch's assessment of a man's health in the grand scheme of the planet, but it was practice.

The man is not any more or less connected to the greater scheme of things as anybody else. He's physically taxed but there is nothing wrong with him on a deeper level.

Meanwhile a slightly less sophisticated plane pulls into the hangar next to the Quinjet. It's a little smaller and painted in a more obvious white and green with the word MUIR emblazoned on it's side. People begin unloading a futuristic-looking hospital bed while a figure in a lab-coat runs up ahead.

A couple minutes later a familiar face in a vaguely futuristic lab coat steps into the hallway and looks around until she spots Theresa in front of one of the cells and hurries over.

"Hi. You're Theresa, right? You asked ASHLIE to contact Muir?"

"That's me," she said, holding out her hand to shake as she racks her brain and the glow in her eyes disappears. "Sara, right?"

"Yep! Nice to meet you. So I hear you have someone with some sort of power incident here?" she asks, glancing into the cell.

"One of the Institute students ran across the situation. He has some sort of destructive power. Shoves his hands right into things and they either explode or crumple and launch themselves. He was even able to mess with a whirlwind I created." She turned back to look at the man. "He seemed sort of ragey out-of-control though, if that makes any sense."

"Hmm, sounds like an uncontrolled mutation, but he looks way too old for that." she says, pulling out a handheld scanning device and sweeping it in the man's direction. Frowning she reaches over to turn off the forcefield and does it again while stepping over to look at the monitoring equipment already hooked up. "He's unconscious but his heart-rate and metabolism are still through the roof. There's all kinds of unstable energy readings. Thermal, telekinetic, some strange neurological signals. I'd have to run some more in depth tests but this looks like a mutation manifesting..."

She takes out a thin needle-like probe and careful inserts it into one of the man's veins, which is surprisingly easy with how much they are bulging. "Holy moly, his adrenaline is off the charts. Increased protein-binding complexes, no inflammatory response, there's some kind of unknown compound in his bloodstream, protein-based if I had to take a guess. "

"Some of that energy may be courtesy of me. I had to shock him a few times before he quit being a threat." She processed the rest of what Sara said, "So his body's producing some sort of new substance or is it foreign?"

"Hang on... Let me see if I can isolate this." she says, tapping away on the screen of her device. "This is weird... It's just MGH, mutant growth hormone, it's one of the proteins produced by the X-Gene but his body is treating it like a foreign substance."

"Which would imply he's not a mutant, all appearances to the contrary," she said, scratching her head as her eyes flared back to life to study the guy. "Going to try something small." She created some simple manipulations of the air around him, creating a little bit of air movement to see if his body responded to the energy. As close as she was, Sara could probably feel the slight breeze.

Any air that flows through the area where his arms are supposed to be gets energized slightly but other than that there's little reaction. Sara takes a cautious step back when she notices the air current, then glances back at her readings. "His power is doing something. Looks like transferring energy. I'm not sure if draining him would help or hurt him at this point."

"Yeah, he's charging the currents," Theresa observes. "Not quite like he did to the whirlwind, but then there isn't as much energy here to influence. So we have a non-mutant with MGH in his system who is exhibiting powers as if he was a mutant. Is that basically what we're looking at right now?" She lets the air return to normal and her eyes go back to normal with it.

"Pretty much. Except his adrenaline is so high, he could probably flip a car even if he didn't have any powers. He'd break several bones, but I don't think he'd care."

"Well, fuck. Excuse my language," Theresa said. "I guess I need to find Miranda and find out how she stumbled across this situation."

"Not a bad idea. I really hope this is just a fluke. I'll run some genetic analysis to see if that tells us anything, but that'll take a bit."

"No worries. We thought if anyone could help him, it would be Muir. That's why we called you."

"I'll get things set up. I really don't want to risk putting this guy on a plane but I think the stuff you have here and what we could bring along should be fine."

"Okay. Give us a shout if you need something. I'm going to see if I can find Miranda and find out if she saw anything."

"Sure thing." she nods and continues to tap away at her screen. Down the hall two Muir techs wheel the fancy hospital bed down the corridor.

"In here, guys," Theresa says, pointing the way before walking off to look for Miranda.

After some time, Theresa returned with a sour look on her face. "Damn that cryptic girl and damn the cryptic mother she gets it from."

"If anybody claims this was magic, I'm out, just so we're clear on this." Sara looks up from her work. The patient/prisoner has been transferred into the more sophisticated bed and hooked up to a number of monitoring equipment.

"Not magic, thank god, though that I could have handled. Worse. Precognition. She says she had a vision of this man talking to another fan and felt some sense of impending doom, so she went to check it out."

"Great, so that tells us roughly not a thing." she frowns.

"She did say that this guy said "He told me it was safe" during one of his slightly less insane moments."

"Ah crap... You think this might be induced by something?"

"It's *an* explanation. I'm not sure it's *the* explanation. Miranda says she didn't actually witness him taking anything, so it's just an assumption on her part and since her visions can be kind of subjective, she's not sure how much is metaphor. Which circles us back around to my earlier statement."

"Well I couldn't find any particular compounds beyond the MGH and that alone shouldn't trigger a change this severe. Then again his metabolism is all kinds of screwy so it might not be in his bloodstream anymore."

"It's something to go on at least. Can MGH be synthesized?"

"No, not to my knowledge. Not for lack of trying, but it undergoes significant post-transcriptional processing, some of which is poorly understood still. And human bodies have a tendency to reject it outright if not coupled with genetic changes."

"So, assuming for the moment that this is some sort of external substance, we'd be looking for someone with significant access to mutants to get MGH from. Forgive the ignorant layman's question, but would you be able to tell what sort of mutant the MGH came from?"

"What's left in his bloodstream is the same you'd find in yours or mine. Without a sample of the original dose it tells us very little."

"It was worth asking," Theresa said. She looked at the man again, "Hopefully he'll recover and can give us some more information."

"We'll see." she frowns slightly. "For what it's worth, your lightning bolts didn't harm him. If anything it disrupted the process and stopped him from actively burning himself out even faster."

Theresa breathed a sigh of relief. "That's good. I was a little worried it added to the problem, but my toolbox was starting to run a little empty, so I had to go with what was left."

"I've been there." she smiles sympathetically. "Having to hurt someone who got dragged into something... It's tough."

"First year as a full member of the team and deathly afraid of screwing up," she confessed with a half-smile.

"My first time out on a mission I lost my cool and let personal crap escalate a difficult situation. I didn't get yelled at as much as I thought I might and if I had to do it all over again I'd probably do the same thing but with a cooler head. I think that's probably the best advice I can give you. All the leadership stuff and the training? It's to teach you how to be in control of yourself, not to overwrite your convictions or make you fall in line. At least that's my opinion."

"Sometimes it can be a little hard to tell when you're in the middle of all of it, but I think you're right."