Issue 1 Downtime

Daniel had managed to swipe a bottle from Skieron's little stash, not really wanting to interrupt the little social hour going on. He found an out-of-the-way room and took his new friend the whiskey bottle in there, not bothering to turn on the lights, since that usually drew people.

After just a few moments alone with his new friend, Daniel would hear soft sobbing coming from the deserted hallway outside his room.

Daniel was going to keep his mouth shut... but sighed, and looked back. "You can hide in here!" he called.

The sobbing stopped for a moment, and then Melody poked her head into the room, her eyes red from crying. "I'm sorry...I didn't want to bother anyone."

"Please. So far I've been shot and found out my home country's a charred wasteland. Can't be much more bothered than that. Here, take a drink," he said, holding out the bottle toward her after taking a swig.

Melody hesitated, sniffled, and then walked in, joining Daniel at the small table he sat at, and taking a big swig of the bottle. "I didn't see you get shot in the fight. How'd that happen?" she asked.

She sniffled again. "I'm Melody, by the way. I'm not sure we've met."

"Daniel. And I... we... sort of tried to take over the van on the way here."

Melody was quiet for a moment before she nodded, 'I guess I can't blame that. They weren't exactly friendly at first. Fuck my head hurts. Bitch headbutted me and her head was made of metal."

"Yeah, well, the bitch put a bullet in my shoulder, too. While someone on our own fucking team held me down. Seriously... do they teach you X-Men survival skills, or is negotiation supposed to be the big life saver?" he asked, still a bit surly about the treatment he'd gotten from Will and Stan.

"I...don't really know much. This is the first time I've ever done anything with the teams."

She grabbed the bottle again and took another swig.

"What's with the 'you'? Aren't you an X-Man?"

Daniel scoffed. "I'm an Accolyte. Taking the van before we got back to a hostile's home turf is pretty standard procedure... but evidently it's considered bad manners today."

"Oh..." Melody said, not really sure what to say. She hadn't met many Genoshans before, and certainly never any Acolytes. She grabbed the bottle again and took another drink to fill the painfully awkward silence.

"So what brand of trauma did they drop on you to brighten your day?" Daniel asked, taking the bottle back to take another swig himself.

"I'm dead. My boyfriend is dead or missing. I don't even want to know what the fuck happened to family who liked mutants, or Chicago, or. God damnit, I don't want to know anything. I want to be home. I know it's our fucking lot in life to get a lot of weird shit thrown at us, but seriously? Time travel?"

"Well, I'm assuming we're here so that we can steal whatever we need to get back. I mean... we got thrown here without even a time travel machine, so you'd think you can do it in reverse. Just let the big brains do the thinking, and wait for the right moment I guess. Oh, and figure out how to keep whatever it was that made our homes into wastelands and hellholes from happening. Big important part, that."

"I guess I hope you're right. That it's reversible and that we can go home..."

"Well, if you want to look at it really carefully, we kind of have to be able to. I mean... even if we can't change the future, which I think is bullshit if anyone says it, how could you die if you were never there to get killed? If we can get here, we have to be able to get back."

"I don't even know. Time travel and all that other hypothetical bullshit was always things I slept through in physics classes."

She took a drink.

"Thanks for inviting me in...I really barely know anyone on this mission, which has made things a lot harder to deal with."

"Yeah, same here," Daniel said, looking irritated. "Hence the 'no one backing me up and getting me shot' thing. I'm going to blast that redhead of theirs before this is over though, I swear to God."

Melody shook her head in support, though she wasn't entirely sure what she thought of Daniel or his views on where they were. At the moment, however, he was being a friend, so she had no intentions of alienating him.

"So. You're from Genosha then?"

"Yep. Born and raised... well, okay, raised at least, don't know about the born part, but I do know the 'raised' part."

"What's it like there? Never been."

"Nice," he said, taking another swig. "The capital's got pretty small land to work on, so all the buildings got built up, some of them even got built deeper down... the sort of thing you can do when you base your workforce needs around mutant powers. Makes for some interesting art galleries and restaurants, too, when people are encouraged to show off their powers instead of hiding them. Aside from that, it's a lot like any other modern place, I suppose. Less history, yeah, but other than that pretty comparable."

"I never knew much about it beyond what I heard or read about this year at school. Wanted to go visit someday. This is about as far from home as I've ever been."

"About twenty years in the future, you mean?" Daniel said, only a little sulkily as he took another pull from the bottle.

Melody snorted slightly. "Yeah...I guess that's what I meant."

"Pass that back over here, I can still feel feelings," she said, holding her hand out for the bottle.

"Well, take it, but I hate to break it to you, the drinking won't make it all go away. It'll just make us too distracted by hangovers to feel it in the morning," Daniel chuckled as he slid the bottle over. "I need a teleporter and maybe a broad-spectrum energy projector to shake my hand, and a few hours with Dr. Tomorrow. Maybe we can straighten this all out without any fancy machines."

"Shhhhhh," she said before taking a long pull. "I didn't ask for this strange 'common sense' you spout. Just the booze to make me forget where the fuck I am." she smirked slightly.

"Here's to that! We've got to keep up with the standard 'young stupid upset people' cliche!" Daniel agreed loudly, taking the bottle back and taking a swig too.

Melody smirked, "This is helping. Thanks for the company, Daniel."

"Hey, when we're surrounded by hard-core X-Men, the rest of us have to stick together, right?" he asked, smirking. "Oh, by the way, what's your power? I think I need to stock up on something more useful with those crazy people pushing us around."

"Stockup?" she slurred slightly.

"I blow shit up," she said, sitting up from the chair she was slouching in, forming a pea-sized glowing blue orb in her hand, a glint of blue light flashing across her eyes in the darkened room. She then chucked the thing at his feet, where it popped like one of those tiny Fourth of July snappers.

"Dance, clown!" she giggled.

"Ooooh!" Daniel said, grinning, reaching across the table. "Let me try! Just shake my hand, it doesn't hurt!"

Melody quirked her eyebrow and complied, shaking his hand.

There was a flash of heat that washed over Melody's body, then Daniel pulled his hand back. "All right... let's see..." He flicked his finger at another chair, and a pulsing red sphere flew at it, exploding hard enough against it to blow it to splinters. "Oooh! I like!" he said, grinning.

Melody giggled. "It's good stress relief, I suppose."

"Jesus Christ, if I couldn't smell your booze all the way down the hallway, I could sure as shit hear you," growled a voice from the pitch black corner of the room.

"I might just hang onto that one. Blowing things up more effectively is always good. Now... let's just see how it combines with the other ones." He held out his hand, and like in the van, about eight marble-sized spheres of orange energy spun around his wrist. Without even a gesture, they all streaked in different directions, then converged on the same spot of metal wall, exploding loudly, leaving a great crater in the wall. "Oh, hi!" he said, noticing Felana. "That mean you want a drink, too?"

Melody, mid drink at that point, did a genuine spit take.

"Holy fucking shit, who's there!"

Felana rose from her crouched position in the dark and stalked towards the pair, her shifted form looking quite intimidating in the dim light of the room. "Might as well, before you two waste it all," she growled.

Her claws clacked against the bottle as she grabbed it from the table and poured some into her mouth with her head back. She set the bottle down on the table and regarded Daniel curiously, sniffing the air. "So what everyone's saying is true. It is you."

"Barely look a day older than the day I first walked in on you and Kyra....like looking at a fucking picture," she marveled bitterly.