"It's a pleasure to finally meet you, miss Blaire." A smooth hand was extended and Ali took it, squeezing it firmly. "It's regrettable it could not have happened sooner."

"Yeah, well..." Ali shrugged. "You were dead, I was dead; the timing was all wrong."

"Yes." Professor Charles Xavier chuckled, gesturing for the young woman to sit, appraising her from across a large mahogany desk. "But here we both are now, and with much to discuss if I'm not mistaken."

"Well, you're not." Ali scratched her head and leaned back on her chair, glancing around the large office and then back at Charles. "I'd like to join the X-Men."

"Yes." Charles nodded, pursing his lips. "Logan suggested you might. I must say I'm glad to hear it." He offered a thin smile. "These are dark days for us, and I'm glad for all the help we can get."

"Yeah, well," Ali smiled, a small burst of explosive purple light springing up from her fingertips, "I'll do what I can to brighten things up around here."

"Let's hope so."

Ali glanced around the room, shifting a bit as she thought. "So...do I, like, have to sign a contract or something?"

He was troubled, stalking through the night to observe quietly the emptying Friends of Humanity chapter house. His guilt loomed over him, for Laura, for Creed, for all of it. He should have stayed in control.

Bone cut through flesh and his claws emerged, porcelain white in the moonlight, not a trace of adamantium left on them. He frowned, closing his eyes, remembering his hard and angry words. He knew that he had failed her; if he had done the right thing it wouldn't have happened. She would not just be a solider. She would have understood.

He would find her, he decided, sheathing his claws. He leaped from the rooftop down to the street, lighting a cigar and mounting his Harley. He had a pretty good idea where he might find her...

(Make sure you've read this entry first!)

( Shortly after the attack on Worthing Industries... )

OOC note: I wasn't quite sure who to tag for this, so in the end, I figured it'd just be an open thread for everybody to participate in case their characters haven't met each other!

The biggest problem that Josh had brought with him from California could be summarized in a single word: packrat. When he first got there he kept himself very busy learning how to surf and skateboard, and at nighttime, whenever he wasn't working, he kept himself busy with other things. The hospital had paid him better than he expected, and he had no one to spend the money on but himself. He'd gone through a model plane building phase, a cookie-baking phase, a charcoal sketching phase, a photography phase, and a multitude of others.

Now, settled back into the Xavier mansion, he hadn't yet kicked the habit. His old roommate was gone, and there wasn't much of anyone he hung out with on a regular basis, so he continued to find new hobbies. He was sunk into a large armchair in the mansion's common room, fiddling with a remote, the kind with a long antenna sticking out of it. The car at his feet remained unresponsive. Josh was sure it wouldn't be long before the car found itself next to the tripod, the ant farming kit (minus the ants), and the whittling tools with the rest of the junk he had amassed.

"Quickly my X-Men!" Xavier's message rang through the minds of every X-Man in the Tri-State area. "There is a situation at Worthington Labs."

***

Indeed, there was and Xavier was not the only one to know of it. As the X-Men assembled in Westchester, those already in the city making double time towards the lab, the Brotherhood of Mutants assembled in the Savage Land, thrumming before Magneto, ready to pass through the Exodus Machine's portal.

***

Outside the central offices of Worthing Industries the Friends of Humanity had been protesting the X-Genome Project, announced the week previous in a very exclusive press conference. What had started as a demonstration had escalated to a riot, building security having more and more difficulty holding back the protesters as more people flooded the area.

Rocks and bottles flew over the insufficient barricade, second floor windows shattering in, raining broken glass on the people below. A molatov cocktail was launched in the air, explosion licking the concrete where it shattered.

Reinforcements were needed, and they arrived: from above, the X-Jet blotted out the sun as it decloaked for a moment; from behind, the portal from the Savage Land opened, the Brotherhood of Mutants pouring out of the vortex and swarming the rear flank of the rioting crowd.