Chapter 5- Discussions in the Enemy Lab

  Preserve – Mysterious Tower's Foundation- Niffle 3, 3983 GR (Morning)

  Nath’aniel-

  Even with Reading Below active much of the notes in front of him made little sense to the mage, a knock on the nearby door frame made him take a break from the pages of jargon before him. When Nath'aniel looked up, Rogue was standing in the doorway. Today's ensemble was a green sleeveless shirt that exposed most of her abdomen, her studded fingerless gloves, and jean shorts that barely covered her shapely bottom.

  “We got Deadpool back together again, but he will still need shardak till he can move about on his own.” The teen announced at him as she took a couple of steps into the b, she stopped and blinked a bit before asking. “What the heck is a ‘shardak’?”

  “I am guessing it is Sovereign for a ‘short time’.” Nath’aniel guessed as he watched her walk closer to him.

  “Who?” The girl muttered as she got beside him.

  The mage pressed the controls and a moment ter a holographic screen and interface appeared. He then pulled up an entry that he had read, before switching to the various pages id about the room, once it loaded she pointed to the monitor in front of him, before he expined. "The aliens that originally came here in that spaceship. According to the oldest records in these systems, they were a team of scientists researching someone they called 'the Beyonder'."

  “I ask again, ‘who?’” Rogue stated. Her accent was starting to grow on him.

  As she got closer to him, his eyes could make out the occasional surge from her choker. Telling him that it was currently on and it was suppressing her Mosul-gene and it was safe for people to touch her.

  When she leaned her head on his shoulder, Nath'aniel cleared his throat before answering. "These Sovereign had scanned over twenty-five pnets during their journey. On six of them, they found sites simir to the Preserve. Most had been damaged or depleted, so they got little information. According to these records, Earth's was the only fully functional site they had found."

  "So this Beyonder was the guy that made the Savage Lands?" The teen guessed. Her eyes seemed to dance across the hologram, like she could actually read the entry, despite it being written in an alien nguage.

  "They believed so, my people only knew that magic wasn't used to make this pce, and that neither we nor the Sky Tribe could replicate it," Nath'aniel stated before closing out of the entry.

  Rogue looked him in the eye, before she asked. “What’s with you dropping all of these names and people? Who is the Sky Tribe?”

  The mage poked her in the nose before he said. “Finish your history homework and you would already know who they are.”

  She grumbled and stomped her feet a bit before compining. “Your lessons are too hard.” She then pouted and curled her upper lip before she asked. “Teach the lesson for us, pwease?”

  Before he could reject her, he heard another woman compin from the doorway. "There you were, Nath'aniel we really need to talk." The albino woman, Copycat, said before walking into the room.

  She gred at him when he held up a finger at her. Rogue had taken the woman’s appearance as her cue to go, but the teen stopped when he asked her. “How are you feeling Rogue, this was the first time you used your powers on so many different people at one time. Do I need to get a shunt ready for you when we get back to the Citadel?”

  The teen smiled before saying. "No, I feel good. The dreamstone filter thingy you gave me seems to be doing what it's supposed to." As she answered she rubbed the device in her right ear. While Magneto built the casing and customized it to her use, Nath had handled the magical side of this for that device that was the only thing she tended to use from her costume.

  If it worked the way he and Magneto designed it, Rogue would be able to route most of the memories that she absorbed into it, instead of into her brain. So normally she would only drain their vitality, powers, and skills. She could still access the memories by removing the dreamstone and using it directly. The mage and mutant leader had worked hard to make it after they overheard both the girl's and her mother's concern about what her draining possibly dozens or hundreds of peoples' memories would do to the girl.

  “Tell me if you need anything ok?” He asked her ask she continued her attempt to leave the b.

  With his discussion with the teen clearly over, Copycat dug into him. “We need to talk.”

  "We can talk about this once we get back to the Citadel," Nath'aniel said hoping to distract her. Not that he wouldn’t talk with her, he was a man of his word, but he also noted that he didn’t say when they would talk once they were back at the Citadel.

  “No! Once we get back there, I will lose you in that pce, and it will be another seven months before I get this option again.” she pced both of her fists on her hips before she continued to speak. “This occasional wetwork job aside, but I can’t start my main job until you supply me with a sample to use my powers on… So do I need to go down to the Cold Hall and pick out one of the women down there?”

  The mage noted that Rogue winked at him, before the teen quietly left them alone. On top of that at some point, Shanna floated into the room and materialized to stand off to the side of the two of them.

  “Mage biology is a touch complicated…” He began to expin to the gene-morph.

  But she interrupted him saying. “Man and woman get together, better part of a year ter a baby comes out, not too hard.”

  “It is for mages!” He actually shouted at her. Once stunned into silence he continued to expin. “Our bodies were changed to serve a purpose, and they changed even further when we lost the means to drain the mystical energy from our bodies. These energies come from beyond our reality, meaning they follow rules different from basic science, thus why we can perform such feats with our techniques.’

  "These energies come from realms you can't even imagine. Worlds where there should be no light. Worlds where water is inhaled because it is too hot for it to take liquid from. These energies sit and saturate our bodies. So while a pair of mages, a man and a woman, as you put it, are both fertile and capable of creating a child, or getting together, again as you again put it. They sometimes cannot do so with each other, because of issues in their bodies. So when I say it is more complicated, listen to me when I say as much.'

  “Because of the dozen female mages in my Cold Hall, only two are at all compatible with me, and even then only slightly. You would have better luck copying Psylocke, or She-Devil here when trying to make a child with me, but that would defeat the purpose of your powers wouldn’t it?”

  The albino woman was almost in tears from his tirad when she asked. "So I am wasting my time here?"

  “I didn’t say that.” The mage admitted.

  Shanna surprised him, when walked over and she sniffed him. As he leaned back, she then added to the discussion. “There was one sample in the entire Citadel, which was moderately compatible with him.”

  Nath frowned. While he had done the tests to compare his genetic makeup to the other dead mages stored in the Citadel, he hadn’t shared the results with anyone yet. However, as he pondered how his Servant knew this, the conversation continued without him.

  Copycat perked up and said. “So I’ll copy her.”

  Again it was his Lancer that continued the conversation. “It’s who she is that is the problem… The sample is from Adalora, daughter of Fornin, daughter of Sal’nick, Nath’aniel’s own mother.”

  “Oh.” The albino muttered, after hearing who the person was.

  After a moment of silence, Nath'aniel muttered. "Even among mages, it is taboo for family to copute." He then shifted his stance and shared a look with the gene-morph and he added. "We will discuss it soon, but it may need to wait till after Entreatment day, so in less than six days we will settle this. You have my word."

  She nodded, and then gestured behind her and said. “I should check in on Wade.”

  Then he was left alone with his newest Servant. After a time and she repeated the action of walking near him and sniffing him, he asked. “What are you doing?”

  "Something about you smells wonderful when you take command," Shanna admitted.

  Nath'aniel was surprised that she had adjusted so quickly, given that before he bound her, she had literally spilt her psyche to deal with her personal trauma. On top of that, there are the odd primal actions she does. Spent more time with the various pnts and animals near the Citadel, rather than spend it with others, even her own colleagues whom she knew before nearly dying.

  "You still getting the odd dreams?" he asked her. She had mentioned about a month ago that she had a reoccurring dream where a giant man covered in moss and grass would stare at her, but not respond to her attempts to interact with it.

  Shanna nodded, and then said. "I noticed in the most recent one, that the giant seems to be injured, so he may be too weak to speak. I don't get the feeling that he is hostile though. Unlike the one Psylocke saw when she used her Noble Phantasm… maybe that's why I can see mine in my dreams, and she can only see hers when she is really distracted or tired."

  Nath’aniel had not been pleased, when Elizabeth admitted that someone, or something, had snuck into her personal dimension that she creates when she used her Noble Phantasm. She even only told him about it, after seeing the creature in a shadow after a night of the two of them being intimate together. Despite believing her, neither the Citadel nor he had seen the creature.

  Thinking about her seemed to call her to them, as he felt her blitz towards them in her spirit form, before materializing in the open doorway. Once fully physical the telepath stated. "Citadel asks that you reactivate your emitter."

  The mage reached into his robes, and pulled out his personal emitter. He pressed the rune to activate it after he pced it on the table in front of him. "Sorry Citadel, but after synching with your tactical sensors I needed a break."

  “Understandable. I wanted to report that I am detecting a magnetic event approaching the Preserve.”

  The mage smiled before he muttered. “He survived.”

  “And from the size of the event, he appears to have the ship in tow with him.”

  "A clean victory then," Betsy muttered, a second ter she frowned. The mage recognized the look was on that she had when she was distracted from reading someone’s thoughts. Then she added. “Exodus and Gypsy are flying out to meet him.”

  “How are beast-men? Do we need to remind them who won?” Shanna asked her fellow Servant.

  “Newmen.” The mage corrected. "The High Evolutionary called them his Newmen." Then he pulled up some of the more recent entries in the system's database. It was a document of this man celebrating his success in making his new race.

  As he did, his lover answered the other Servant’s question. “No, they became very subdued when they heard their leader left without them… That of course brings us to the other problem. Their society is a romanticized feudal one, so we just killed a bunch of their top and midlevel leadership. So we will have to wait till Magneto returns with the ship to settle things outside.”

  “All of them?” Shanna asked, somewhat surprised.

  As the two Servants shared a look, Nath'aniel restarted organizing the notes and papers in the b. Through the tactical optic that he and Magneto spped together, they modified the designs that he had found in his father's Archive. Well, Magneto mostly modified it. Regardless, because of the device he had a very detailed bird's eye view of the entire battle, so he knew exactly how many knights and other personnel they had killed today.

  The mage wondered if his growing frustration was what ended their staring contest because suddenly Betsy blinked before saying. "Yes. As far as I could tell, the only knight still standing was the one Murmur tagged with her glove. The rest are either dead or bedridden."

  "So we wait," Nath'aniel muttered, and that seemed to settle it for the two of them.

  Betsy nodded and said. “I have an errand.” Before she vanished again in a spirit jump.

  Shanna on the other hand reached into a utility pouch, which she strapped to her thigh in pce of one of her long-bded knives, and pulled out a stone to sharpen her spearhead with. The mage didn't want to point out to her that the spear she materialized with when he bound her was actually Makluan Fang, and any sharpening she did would be undone. As the fang naturally sharpens and repairs itself over time.

  After his third attempt to read the notes in front of him, he sighed and tossed them through the hologram system. They nded on the top of the actual electronic thought engine.

  The sound of her scraping stone over bone, made the mage look at her, and after a moment he said. “You must have been in spirit form when I ran those compatibility tests, because I don’t remember anyone being there when I did them.”

  Shanna looked at him for a second, before returning the stone to the spearhead. "The regenerator had taken to sleepwalking, and this was before you two had a contract. Worried that it was a trick, we took turns shadowing you at night. And I wasn't spying, you had walked away to get something to drink when the results finished."

  “Then you read Magi.” Nath’aniel guessed.

  She didn't look away from her sharpening as she expined. "No, but I graduated from both medical school and veterinary school in college, out in California. You probably don't know where that is, anyway, but let's just say that I know a DNA test when I see one… You weren't joking when you said that mages were a subspecies of humans. There was a lot I didn't recognize but still enough there that I did."

  The mage reached through the hologram, and grabbed the notes. Then he used a simple cantrip to float the stack of papers over to her. As they were still in the air he asked. “Would you take a look at these?”

  Shanna leaned the spear against the wall, and grabbed the stack when it got close enough. She seemed unfazed at first, but as she got through page after page she had a massive confused look on her face. The Servant got through only half of the pile when she decred. "These can't be all of them. Half of these formus are incomplete. And these DNA profiles have major gaps in them."

  Nath'aniel crossed his arms, before saying what was on his mind. "I thought that as well, a greedy schor might keep some of his work elsewhere, to prevent someone from copying his work. However I was reading his entries, and in them, he doesn't seem greedy or selfish. This High Evolutionary truly believes that his work will help the world. So I don't see him concealing his work.'

  “More than that, it doesn’t even look to me that some of those notes had been written with other paper on top of it. So I think it’s something else… honestly, it reminds me of when Betsy was fighting with her own grief from her restored memories, and Assassin would take over.”

  “Are you trying to say that this High Evolutionary is a Servant?” a voice from outside the b asked them. a moment ter, Mystique and her son Nightcrawler walked into the building.

  The mage waved away that conclusion, before saying. “Oh, no. He is clearly a member of the Tribesmen of the Land, and nothing here would indicate to me that any magic is known by these people. That isn’t to say that some of them couldn’t learn, their sparks seemed strong enough to learn. However, am fairly certain that he is either a bearer of the Mosul or Cedra gene, but regardless of which, his is active."

  The shape-shifter tilted her head in confusion. However the mage was rescued by the boy, when he tapped his mother on the shoulder and told her. "I think that he is trying to say their leader is either a mutant like us or an Enhanced."