If you want to help me financially, you can do it on https://www.patreon.com/NeverluckySMILE
Harry did in fact meet up with Scott and Rogue moments after he left. Rogue was looking good, still a little Goth but she seemed to be slowly moving away from that style now that she could freely touch people as long as she was wearing the runic array he had created for her.
Scott had taken his demotion last week far better than Harry had feared he might. He took part in the team exercises and seemed to have no trouble taking orders from anyone, though it was obvious the changes in Jean still bothered him at times when she was taking her turn as team leader. Still he had been spending more time just hanging out with the teams and had patched things up with Spyke, Kurt and Kitty by taking every prank they threw his way with a smile on his face. He now displayed a sense of empathy that had been sorely lacking in him before, and seemed willing to listen to other's opinions, though of course they would have to wait and see if that continued if he became team leader again. He also was listening to Harry, absorbing everything he said not just about tactics and strategy but leadership and other intangibles.
Rogue went first, punching, kicking, and trying to bend or mangle the piece of 6' by 6' by 1' slab of red metal. She failed miserably and smiled to herself knowing her armor was made of the same metal.
Scott went next, the beam thin and concentrated as he could make it. He slowly ramped up the power of his eye-beams to full power then holding it there continuously as long as he could. Fifty minutes after he hit maximum power the red beam of power cut out and he went to one knee, gasping. "Th-that's it for me sir, how'd it do?"
Harry laughed slapping him on the shoulder, then gently giving him a hand up. "No problem boyo, your endurance is getting better all the time. When I first arrived you couldn't have held that beam half as long." Indeed all the teens had built up their physical endurance and the endurance needed to use their powers several times over from when he had first arrived here. "As for how the test went, see for yourself."
On a stone plinth in the center of the Danger room the slab of Harrytanium sat, not even scorched. Rogue whistled. "That stuff is really incredible. Ah well, unless you still need me Mistah Potter, Ahm off tah find Kitty. Wolverine's jeep is out of thah shop and ah want tah borrow it before he knows its ready to be picked up." She walked off, making a point of swishing her hips, delighting in the fact her growth spurt had actually given her some.
Scott stared after her, his mouth agape for a moment and his face obviously blushing under his visor before a chuckle from Harry broke him out of his momentary brain freeze. "Um, I, I'm going to go too sir, unless you need me for something else?"
"No Scott, I think we can conclude that my conjured metal is the same as the original. Now I need to figure out a way to work with it and create it without constantly conjuring." Despite his power, conjuring that chunk of metal had taken a noticeable bite out of his reserves last night. He was pretty certain he could conjure enough to make a full suit, but it would put him on his back for the rest of the day. "Now it's back to work. I'll see you after dinner for the normal discussion okay?"
"Yes sir," Scott replied.
Harry had instigated a round table discussion after dinner on how the team exercise went that day because Ororo had taken over training the X-men in team exercises since the Magneto incident, while Logan was still in charge of single exercises and general psychical endurance. These discussions gave Harry and Charles some insight on how the group was doing and where to improve things.
The teens had all taken turns by this point at the leadership role and Ororo and Harry had not been surprised that Jean was the one to step up the most. While she had a bit of a temper issue it wasn't much, and she was easily the best leader among the X-men bar Scott. None of the others were willing to really put in the work to be a good leader, to learn and to read about modern weapons and small unit maneuvers and to try and understand tactics.
Case in point, he hadn't made the after dinner discussions mandatory and only Scott and Jean kept on showing up every day to talk with him and the other teachers. The others would show up if he reminded them after they led the training run, but they didn't contribute as much as Scott or Jean.
Kurt had charisma but no work ethic, Rogue wasn't able to plan like a leader (she just couldn't plan ahead at all) and didn't seem comfortable giving orders.
Evan had the drive, but none of the intuitive understanding necessary, and once assigned the leadership role he became a little arrogant and unwilling to listen to the suggestions of his friends much like Scott was at first. Afterwards he was mostly apologetic about it, but that didn't mean much if he couldn't stop it from happening.
Kitty was much like Rogue, much happier in the background and almost unable to give orders except in the direst of circumstances. When she did they were usually correct, but she wasn't willing to put in the work either, not that Ororo and the others had tried very hard to get her to do so. She was far more valuable to the team in her natural position as researcher and sometime spy/infiltrator to give her more duties.
Jean on the other hand was charismatic, forceful and more than willing to shoulder any work they gave her. She was developing into a excellent and imaginative engineer already, simply absorbing any books on the subject she could get her hands on at an incredible rate. Her powers continued to become stronger and more versatile as she worked with them and this work ethic carried over to her turns as team leader.
The problem with her was she and Rogue simply could not get along, and Scott's problems with her new attitude often got in the way. He was able to take orders well enough from the others, showing again his growth and maturity, but taking orders from Jean seemed to bother him. Rogue seemed to just not like Jean for some reason, though it could just be two beautiful girls in one very small ring. As her walking out of the Danger Room showed just now Rogue had recently begun a growth spurt into what would become a truly magnificent womanhood, whereas Jean was well along the same road. Kitty still had the coltish appearance of a teen in comparison, but didn't seem to care either.
Harry shook his head as he watched Scott leave. Charles had been right if for the wrong reasons when he wanted to keep Scott as team leader, but his demotion seemed to have given him the impetus to take his role to the next level. He'd wait a few more weeks (if he was still here, Harry honestly had no idea how long his plans would take to get to the point where he was ready to move out) before suggesting his punishment was over, but to his mind and Logan's there was no doubt Scott would be back as team leader soon enough.
He sighed and shook his head. "Back to work." With that he grabbed the now cool metal and headed back up to his lab, where he put a sign on the door telling everyone to keep out before starting his work.
Emma left later that day, but no one saw Harry until dinner time, and he still hadn't figured out how to really work with the metal in question. He had tried to heat it enough to be worked with and failed miserably. The only things he hadn't tried was Fiendfyre and Blackfyre. The idea that Fiendfyre would work was tempting but how to actually contain it, that was the question. Not even he could contain Fiendfyre enough to just heat a piece of metal in a crucible or whatever. Blackfyre was another idea, but again he needed to figure out how to contain it. Not only that but to keep the fire going hot while he worked with the metal.
"Then too," he said, looking over at Hedwig, who was watching him with what looked like amusement on her feathered face. "I had hoped to figure out a way to make a business that would rely on Harrytanium as part of its main building block, the idea of selling crysis suits based off this is just... Heh, especially since I've developed the spells to change the metal back to its constituent parts." He gestured to his work table, where he had taken apart the conjure chunk of Harrytanium into the different metals that went into its creation.
The strange crystalline metal was deep maroon in color, and Harry was almost positive that it was the reason for the metals strange durability to heat, and possibly to force and to his conjuring or trying to shape the metal via magic, though he was certain it was a combination of it and the metal he could possibly call durasteel, like the metal for spaceships in Star Wars.
"How can I get heat at that level? If sustained laser fire can't do it, then those two spells are the only thing that might do it. Unless… unless I can mix science and magic somehow…"
That night Harry again pulled an all-nighter, and was eventually able to figure out a way. He had been right in a way, the maroon colored metal really was the issue but he could conjure enough of it to work with and add to the terrestrial metals. The more he did, the more certain he was that it would be almost impossible for someone else to recreate via technological means. It was almost as if it was somehow a bit of magic itself given a solid form. Still he had been able to work with it.
First he went up to Asteroid M, taking Melody some leftovers and spending a few hours with her before her bedtime, then went to work. Then he added some more defensive and strengthening wards, not feeling any of the strain he had felt the day before after enlarging many of the rooms to the maximum level he could. That made sense now that he thought of it, after all what the long term and powerful enlarging charms did was create a pocket dimension that just happened to have an entrance into your dimension at the point of overlap. So when he had enlarged several of the rooms by 15,000 times, he was actually creating pocket dimensions of that size.
Next he set up one of the asteroid's lab rooms to make it as heat resistant as science and magic could make it, adding even more wards to the hearthstone. Then he segmented the room, creating a series of smaller rooms with a conveyor belt between them. In the first several segments he used various technological means to heat the metal on the conveyor belt, and in the last room he got creative in a way that would set every wizard back hom, both his friends and not, to screaming at him. He figured out how to use a runic array to create Fiendfyre in an enclosed space.
The runic array needed to do it took him the rest of the night and well into the next day to get right, but in the end a large square furnace was created at the end of the line. This segment of the room was separate from the rest, and the other more normal metals would be fed into this room to join the already molten maroon metal which Harry was tempted to call Fantasium, because by all the laws of molecules and science it simply could not exist.
By the time he went back to the mansion he had enough Harrytanium, and in the shape and size he wanted it to be, that he could recreate his crysis suit with the metal added to it. He was also almost as magically exhausted as he had been when he powered the hearth stone, and he collapsed into bed after a bleary-eyed greeting sent Ororo's way.
OOOOOOO
Lance sighed as he walked into the school on Monday morning, wondering when the hell school had become a haven for him. He hadn't been a stranger to being on the run, he'd run away from home a few times when he was younger, and Mystique made damn certain all her students knew how to evade the authorities. But whoever the hell was after him now was better at this than anyone else that had tried to track him. Worse was his suspicion that there was more than one group after him.
Lance hadn't returned to the Brotherhood's dorms after coming back to New York with the X-men. He knew that after the fights that had gone on (and seeing the amount of damage Pyro and Jean had done to the park near the mansion) he knew the authorities would be looking for them, and he didn't particularly want the rest of the Brotherhood to find him either. Magneto had proven he wasn't very trustworthy, and Lance didn't want any part of his almost Nazi agenda.
Instead he had made his way via public transportation to his mom's place and then disappeared into the New York sprawl for the weekend before showing up for school on Monday, more to see Kitty than anything else, though he also wanted to see if anything had happened with Fred and the others. He wasn't exactly friends with them, least of all Pietro, but he had been team leader, and they were sort of his responsibility. Especially since, you know, he had egged them into the worst matchups possible. It hadn't come as a shock to him that the trio were gone, though whoever had grabbed them hadn't left him any indication they had tried to find him.
After Monday at school the feeling of being watched had started, and he went to ground again. He found new uses for his earthquake power, opening up tiny caves in the earth where he could hide out in the woods when his instincts told him to disappear entirely. Starting Wednesday Kitty had actually begun to help him by smuggling food to him, though she did also press him to reconsider joining the X-men. Lance still wasn't ready to start drinking the 'hero' Kool-Aid though.
Kitty had seen a lot of guys in suits around school and in town, and she had also passed on that Charles had felt something, someone with mental powers moving around on Sunday. That had been more than enough to convince Lance he wasn't just feeling jittery. The problem was that suits meant Fed's, and they didn't normally ransack and set deadly booby traps for their quarry, they tended to want you alive.
After a full week of living on the road and in the forests, Lance had snuck back to the Brotherhood dorm to grab a change of clothing. When he tried to leave however someone tried to shoot him with some kind of electrical gun out of nowhere! He had dodged back inside, and then used his power to collapse the house behind him as he ran out the back door. He had been attacked by someone else there too, some asshole in a dark blue spandex outfit with purple highlights and a white mask. The dude had shot at him, but Lance had dodged the electrical bolt and slammed a piece of pipe upside his head. The man had flinched aside, but to Lance's surprise had kept on his feet and shot at him again when Lance ducked out onto the road.
He had seen a black van pull up as he ran way, but hadn't spent any time waiting around to see what was happening, and after that had used his power to break a way into the sewers, which he used to get away.
It had not been an easy time for him, so he could be excused for sleeping through most of his classes. Why the school was safe he didn't know or care really, he was just going to take advantage of it.
Today Lance was woken up from his American history class (a snooze worthy class if ever there was one in his opinion) by a gentle touch on his shoulder. He started up, his power activating and causing the whole building to rumble for a moment then he saw it was Kitty and he got control of himself. "Hey Kitty, is it lunch time already?"
Kitty looked down at her boyfriend frowning a little. While they weren't anything serious, nowhere near Teach and Storm, but that didn't mean she didn't care for him, and she didn't like seeing him so tired like this. "Are you sure you don't want to move in with us at the mansion? We haven't been bothered yet."
Lance scowled a little. "That's because you have a damn mind reader and a wizard living with you, they tend to diffuse any attention sent your way. Besides, it's not just what might have happened," He grimaced, "wherever the hell we fought that asshole with the bucket helmet. I think the government might have a good idea who he is, and that the Brotherhood answered to him." He wanted to mention the other group that was after him, but he didn't want Kitty and the other do-gooders to try and butt in on his business like that. This just went to show that despite the gains he had made in maturity, he was still a teenager in many ways and didn't want his girlfriend trying to save him.
Kitty frowned but let the matter drop for now. The two spent lunch together, ignoring the odd looks thrown their way. Not that many people had any attention to spare for the preppy Kitty and the grungy Lance going out. Not with the big news on campus, that the power couple of Duncan and Jean had split up. The news depended on which rumor you heard of course, which ranged from Jean finding Duncan shacked up with another cheerleader and threatening to geld him, to Duncan catching Jean going out with one of the teachers from the Institute, and him dumping her. The gender of that teacher was left to the imagination of the listener strangely enough.
Lance looked over the table at Kitty. "Is that true?"
Kitty nodded. "Yep. Jean went out with a new friend, I didn't meet her that long, and they found Duncan at Margaritaville with another girl playing tonsil hockey. Jean kicked him to the curve right away."
Lance grinned as the group next to them shared the rumor that Jean had been hooking up with 'that hot black woman' from the institute. "And where did Potter and Ms Munroe appear in all this?"
"They went along as chaperones." Kitty abruptly changed the subject. "Anyway, what are you doing after school?"
"The same thing I've been doing for a week now, getting the hell out of dodge. Sorry, I know that I haven't been a good boyfriend lately." Lance replied sadly.
"Don't worry about it, but you know maybe they just want to ask you some questions or something." Kitty replied, trying to be comforting.
Lance shook his head at Kitty's naïveté . "Trust me, the Feds never just want to ask questions. And with my record, no way am I going to talk to any cops, either the kind in a uniform or a suit."
Kitty shrugged and dropped the subject for now.
OOOOOOO
Harry continued his work on the asteroid Monday, needing to take a break from working with the metal. In one area he set up a lab for Reed, and in another room near the hanger bay he set up a incoming portkey destination, which he could tie into any portkeys he created to bypass the anti-apparition wards. Eventually once he or his allies figured out how it would be replaced by a teleporter, but right now if people came up it would have to be via his portkeys which would drop them off here. Of course the portkeys he created would only work for the people he gave them to, but he was paranoid to set up even more intent based wards here then with a shrug added them to the hearthstone, enlarging them to cover the entire asteroid.
After this he groaned but went back to work on the metal.
After that he walked the short distance to see Melody. Despite the fact her room had a TV that could pick up any channel in the world (the upshot of being in an asteroid was you could easily hack into every satellite around) Melody enjoyed simply spending time in the garden with the songbirds, who seemed to have adopted her as one of their own. It amused Harry to walk in and see her sitting at a tree stump or leaning against a tree with dozens of little birds perched every which way on her.
Now was no different and she was sitting there singing some children's song or other but she stopped and looked up at him. "Hello Mr. Harry, how are you? Your songs look much louder today, you were so tired yesterday."
"I'm fine Melody, good night's sleep fixed me right up. How about you, are you enjoying yourself up here?" Harry took Melody's hand and gently pulled her to her feet, escorting her to the dining table, which was set up right in the center of the jungle in a small clearing. "Now, I have pasta salad, homemade fish and chips, or homemade pizza."
Melody grinned. "Oh I love it here, so many songs, and all of them vibrant and happy. Um, I've never had fish and chips, let's try that." She sat down at one side of the small table while Harry pulled the food out of the same basket he had used in his picnic date with Ororo right after he had finished his flight array.
After he set the food out Harry pulled out some sodas and set them on the table, chuckling as Melody grabbed the grape soda as soon as he put it down. "Honestly if we let you you'd turn into a grape with all of that stuff you drink." Melody giggled at the idea, but did not relinquish her hold on the soda bottle. "Is there anything you want me to bring you, clothes I believe Ororo is handling this week at some point, she's busy giving the kids tests, but after that she'll go shopping for clothes for you but is there anything else you want?"
Melody blushed a little, her index pressing against one another in front of her face. "Um, could I have a teddy bear?"
Harry looked blank for a moment. "Um, sure I guess. Uh, would those be in regular toy stores or what?" Harry had never owned any toys, let alone a teddy bear, and Dudley had only been given one when he was a very young toddler, and had promptly ignored it. Harry had only seen it once before it was thrown in the garbage. He actually had no idea what was in a teddy bear, so couldn't just conjure it. Besides, it probably meant more if he had to go and buy it rather than just wave his hands.
Melody looked a little perplexed. "I think a regular toy store? Oooh, go to the one in New York with the giant piano thingy on the floor. I saw it in a movie once and it looked like fun."
"I'll look into it. My work on Harrytanium," he paused as his name for the metal made Melody giggle for a moment, "Is almost done, and I'll see about getting you a teddy bear and some other toys after I'm done with it. And seeing as you and everyone else thinks I'm pants at naming things, how about you think up a name for this asteroid."
Melody cocked her head to one side. "Um, how about High Note? Or Symphony or perhaps Babylon? Since you have the gardens and stuff." Harry gaped at her and she giggled. "You see, it's not so hard is it?"
Harry composed himself and shook his head. "I'll ask Ororo's opinion, but I think either High Note or Babylon would work. High Note sounds better, Babylon might have religious connotations, I'm not certain." Religion in the wizarding world was based more on ancestor worship than anything else, with Merlin being the preeminent god, and Morgana Le Fay being seen as the evil goddess (or at least she was seen that way by wizards, witches had a different view of course) and he had never really bought into it there, and the less said about the Dursleys and religion the better. "But thanks Melody that helps a lot."
Melody grinned brightly at the praise, and the meal continued on the same happy note.
OOOOOOO
While Harry was having a nice early dinner with Melody, school had let out back in Bayville. This joyous time found Lance and Evan walking through the school gate, arguing about whether snowboarding was cooler than skating. "Man I tell you, you can pull moves off in a snowboard that you just can't come close to with a board."
"That's because if you screw up with a snowboard you land in snow, the best you'll deal with is bruises. When you pull off mad moves on a skateboard, you're putting your life on the line, that's what makes it so thrilling."
Lance's rebuttal was interrupted by a man in a suit suddenly stepping out of the crowd and stopping in front of them. "Lance Alvers?"
Lance looked up and cursed at the official looking man. He was about to use his powers to rock the man off his feet so he could get away, but then stopped as Evan threw a friendly arm around his shoulders. Despite his differences with the Brotherhood and their beliefs, if it was a choice between seeing a sort of frenemy carted off by The Man, or standing by him, Evan knew what he'd choose. "Dude what did you do now? Musta been something for a Fed to come after you?"
"I am not a Fed, as you put it Mr. Daniels," the man a middle aged white male with close cropped hair wearing a good suit said. The use of his name made Evan stiffen in turn, and his hands dropped to his side, one hand hidden behind Lance's body.
The man seemed to not notice, simply reaching inside his pocket, a move that made both teens stiffen further but he simply pulled out a badge. "I work with the Strategic Hazard, International Espionage Law-Enforcement Division, or SHIELD. We just have some questions to ask you regarding the activity that occurred a week ago. If you could just get in the car, we could go someplace more private for our talk."
Lance frowned for a moment, looking around but before he could say anything another man got out of the car, his eyes like a hawk but with a friendly smirk on his face. Clint had read the file they had on Alvers, and recognized Lance as someone like himself, a hard scrapper who was unwilling to trust authority because it had failed him so often. "Easy kid, we just want ta talk. You don't have to go with us anywhere, we can talk in public just as easy as anywhere else."
Lance looked at the second man thoughtfully, easily recognizing this as a classic 'good cop, bad cop' situation, but he shrugged it off, realizing he couldn't get away, not without using his powers in full view of a lot of his classmates. He didn't know that Charles was willing and able to go into their minds and erase memories if he needed to of course. And he also didn't want to drag the X-kids into his problems. Of course this showed that despite his growing maturity he was still a teenager at heart. "Alright, there's a pizza joint about two blocks from here, let's talk there. You're buying of course. I'll see you later Daniels."
Clint grinned and led the way, while the other man got back into the car. Evan was left staring after Lance, his eyes narrowed thoughtfully before he turned and ran back to find the others before they left for home.
The others were easy to convince, their own curiosity and concern for their frenemy making all of them but Jean, who still had after school duties as a soccer player now that the soccer season had started, follow along with Evan to see what was going on. They grabbed a seat at an outdoor café across the way from the pizza place, easily able to see the window booth that Lance and his interlocutors sat at.
Inside the pizza joint Clint had introduced himself and ordered a large pizza for the two of them, then waited until the waiter had left with their order before starting. "Alright kid, you probably know what this is all about, so let's not beat around the bush okay? What you might not know is that Magneto, the one who was controlling those metal ball things, is a wanted international criminal, and associating with him in any way can get you sent to jail for twenty years no questions asked." He waited a few seconds to let that sink in before continuing. "Now I'm not going to ask you to sell out your friends or anything like that, but we need to know what happened."
That was unfortunately true. The punk they had captured, Pyro, didn't know anything, or at least nothing important to the matter at hand. They knew more about the Brotherhood now, but the separate chapters (or cells, depending on who you talked to) seemed to be different depending on who the trainer was. Pyro had led them to what amounted to a mutant terrorist cell in New Orleans, but by the time they got that out of him the rest of that chapter had disappeared. This teen and his crew seemed more like a juvie gang than anything, but he might still know more about the big picture than the heavily indoctrinated Pyro, who just kept on spouting quasi-religious BS about the coming rise of mutantkind at the interrogators.
Lance leaned back, glaring at the man but eventually nodded. "Alright, but you'll have to answer a few questions for me too." Clint nodded slowly at that. "First off, if I answer your questions what happens to me?"
Clint shrugged. "Nothing. We just want our questions answered." And hopefully a clue as to where Magneto is now and what the hell he's up to. The brass was majorly disturbed by the idea of someone with his dogma having developed a terrorist organization as decentralized and widespread the Brotherhood seemed to be, and any clue about their plans would be a major help.
Lance frowned thoughtfully, wondering what to tell the other man. He didn't want to fill them in on the X-men after all, but how much to tell was the question. "Alright, I guess I can fill you in on some stuff, though none of us in the, well I guess the local Brotherhood chapter, knew about the rest of them or even Magneto until Candra showed up with that Pyro punk. And we didn't have a clue that Magneto, that insane prick, was our real backer."
He stopped then as the pizza arrived, and the two took a moment to grab slices of the oily goodness and wait for the waiter to leave before going on. "We all stuck together because we believed what we were told, about mutants needing to gather together to defend themselves from prosecution." This time his frown was grim. The news of the last week and a bit was becoming more and more anti-mutant as the Friends of Humanity gained got more and more screen time in New York. Anti-mutant propaganda was on the rise everywhere, but it seemed to have just stepped up to a whole new level in America. "We were brought together by our trainer over the last year or so, we called her Mystique…"
"GAH!" Lance looked up as Clint seemed to choke on his bite of pizza. Clint waved his concern away and grabbed his glass of water, clearing his throat before staring over at Lance. "Mystique!? Normal height with blue skin and red hair when she's not using her power to look like someone else?" Lance nodded and Clint began to rub his face worriedly. Crap, a spy like her was in the United States and we never even heard about it?! I am so damn glad I'm not the one that's going to have to explain that!
SHIELD knew who Mystique was of course, but her power was almost tailor-made for a spy, and keeping tabs on her took an entire department and working with spy agencies worldwide, something that was always volatile at best. While she wasn't anywhere near as dangerous on a global scale as Magneto, her abilities and her training made her someone no-one wanted operating in their backyard. He had heard reports of the FF having designed some tech to detect shape-shifters, but it hadn't been made available to anyone else yet, and no one else had come up with anything that could discover someone like her.
Our last report on her was barely a month ago and put her in China cozying up to one of the crime lords there, how the hell has she been in America for this long without a single fucking sign of her? Even with her power there should have been some sign…
To be fair to SHIELD, keeping track of Mystique was difficult at the best of times and when she had the inadvertent help of one of the world's most powerful telepaths, that made it impossible. Mystique should have been spotted several times over the last year despite her caution, but all of those times was when she was in conflict with the X-men, and Charles routinely erased the memories of their clashes from the memory of anyone who saw them. He hadn't realized that this helped his enemy just as much.
Clint came back to the here and now and motioned Lance to continue. He did so, giving a lot of background as he knew it about the Brotherhood as well as what he had seen of Magneto, but downplaying the X-Men's abilities, simply saying they were another group of mutants brought together to be trained in their powers and self-defense. Clint let it go, seeing no point in forcing the issue. Besides they already had a handle on some of the X-Men's powers, and they had backing from some serious power players in the American government.
Instead he tried to draw Lance out on the one real unknown, Potter, while they continued to eat the pizza slowly. Despite his best efforts though Lance refused to be drawn on him and whatever powers he might possess. Clint wondered what the man had done to inspire such loyalty in someone who was at least nominally on the opposing side. Nor did Lance let any hint of his relationship with Kitty or Rogue and Kurt's with Mystique out. He wasn't willing to share those tidbits with anyone else.
Still it gave Clint a better picture of what had happened then they had, even with the rather obvious cover up about how they actually beat off Magneto. The fact he had been using, in Lance's words 'some occult mumbo jumbo' to power-up and brainwash the younger mutants was a major issue and was way more disturbing than any question about Potter.
Lance finished his story and put down his pizza, looking over at the older man. "And that's about all I know."
Clint nodded, wondering why the hell Lance hadn't given him any description about the setting for this fight against Magneto, but shrugged it off as unimportant, since he knew that the asteroid had been destroyed. "Alright kid, that was all I wanted to know. Now, what're your questions?"
"You know anything about a group whose troops dress in dark blue uniforms with purple gloves and white masks?" Lance asked immediately.
Clint shook his head, wondering where the hell that had come from. Since there had been no evidence or witnesses at all to the assault on the retrieval team that had taken Candra SHIELD had no idea about a group that had a uniform like that. "No clue kid, why?"
Lance paused for a moment, then shook his head. "No reason really." He really had no reason to trust Clint despite his personable nature, and he knew that secret agents kept files, so even if one agent was trustworthy, that didn't mean that everyone who had access to those files was.
Clint shook his head mentally at that but let the kid go with no further comment and stood up. "In that case kiddo, you're free to go. Stay out of trouble from now on kay? Your powers don't put you above the law."
Lance shrugged. "So long as the law protects us all equally I won't go out of my way to break it, that's the best you're going to get."
Clint barked a laugh and shook his head as he walked away. The kid has balls, that's for sure.
Lance set there for all of a minute before Kitty burst into the pizza parlor and made a beeline for him, followed swiftly by the rest of the X-kids. She slid into the booth across from her boyfriend, looking at him anxiously. "Like, what was that all about?"
Lance blinked then smiled a little, carefully hiding it. Despite his desire to be independent and not wanting to involve the X-teens with his problems, it was nice to know Kitty cared.
Before he could ask however Kurt asked "Und are you going to finish that pizza?" The others all looked at him askance. "Vhat?"