AnnouncementSorry for the recent te postings, been doing some st minute edits before I put up the chaptersChapter 6- Complications with Newmen

  Preserve – Newmen Compound- 2008- 10- 21 (Late Morning)

  Elizabeth ‘Betsy’ Braddock- (Psylocke/Assassin)

  Betsy found the person she sought on the northern hill of the compound, and unlike what she hoped the person in question wasn't alone. Still, they had made a bet, and she lost. A part of her wondered if that was why Lancer had been so fierce in the battle.

  So as to not startle the three sitting on the hill, she exited her spirit jump only halfway up the hill. Even in her human form, Wolfsbane noticed her first. The short redhead waved as the telepath walked up the rest of the way.

  Basilisk stood on the hill's peak, her upper arms crossed while one of her left lower arms held a green cloth to a wound on the side of her leg. Wolfsbane stood up and ran to hug Betsy. The teen and she had gotten closer once Nath'aniel hit upon an idea that the tricks that Betsy used to block out unwanted thoughts might also help the young feral mutant to keep 'the beast', as she calls it, in check. So far he had been right.

  Betsy guessed that he hit upon the idea after several of the teen’s sessions with him, as they still had to have one of their members had to sit down with him every other day as part of the terms of their staying at the Citadel.

  “I didn’t lose out to it again. It reared up a couple of times Bets, but I did like you told me to, I put a wall between me and her and I didn’t lose control. Not even when I got cut up bad by a sneak attack.” Rahne said as the two hugged each other.

  “That’s great. That means you are still three months without the colr and an outbreak. Good for you.” Elizabeth said smiling at the teen, while rubbing her back. Then she looked over the shorter girl’s head at the third person on the hill.

  Sitting in the shadow of Bass, was one of the beast-men. A newman, Betsy corrected herself. This was a female feline, with red fur and blonde hair. Her dress was torn in a few pces, and these tears were sharp and clean. So to her trained eye, Betsy knew that unlike most of the other non-combatants, this one actually resisted.

  Before she could talk to the person she sought, the Newman asked a question. “Did the Great One really leave us?” The beast woman just seemed to stare absently ahead of herself even as she asked the question.

  The telepath looked to the Brotherhood’s muscle, who nodded at her, before she answered the cat woman. “Yes, and no. You see our leader, Magneto gave chase and seems to have captured your ship and he is on his way back now."

  Hearing that their leader may be returning, seemed to breathe some life back into the catgirl. As she looked up and asked her. “Really? He’s coming back?”

  Thinking that reaction was weird, Betsy asked the others. “Has she been like this the whole time?”

  “They all have.” Rahne started to answer, but flinched at her expression when the telepath turned to look at her.

  Basilisk finally spoke, asking. “You think it’s like that one twatwaffle, you know the one, back a couple of years ago?”

  Assassin had to take over, when Betsy thought about that mission. Those memories made her so angry that she had to retreat before she did something she'd regret. When she answered her ally, her voice was cold. The first time in a long while that they heard this voice. "Maybe… Can you carry her?"

  “Her, yeah. The pig guy is still back by the ke, because the wanker is too heavy." As she answered, the rge woman rexed all of her arms, save the ones still applying pressure to her leg. At the Servant's nod, the rge woman reached down and pulled the woman up.

  “I have to be ready to aid him when he returns.” The cat woman stated, once on her feet.

  "Yeah, we're getting you ready, so you can be. Let's go." Bass compined, as she lifted the cat into a princess cradle.

  Instead of spirit jumping, Assassin escorted the small party. While she had felt the minds gathered near the cluster of buildings, seeing all of the Newmen just sitting and staring was a touch jarring. Well not all, there was a knight of the canine bloodline that stood watch over them, and alongside him were Rogue, Murmur, and Quicksilver.

  Although the speedster seemed to be doing a dance, rather than doing his job of watching the non-reactionary people.

  ‘Where did the fire elemental wonder off to?’ The Servant wondered

  Seeing Rahne's offer. “I am going to see if I can get Quicksilver to find medical supplies for the wounded.” Before she ran off towards the rge gathering. Seeing them made Betsy have to create her own wall, not at the memories, but at the feelings towards pouring out of the newmen.

  Seeing her shiver, the rge mutant muttered. “The dead can’t hurt anyone.”

  "You're right, but bad memories can still enrage a person," Betsy expined once she fully returned to herself.

  As the shadows of the buildings swallowed them, the rge woman added. “You got that right… why do you think I like punching people. No offense to you, and cutting your people up with your sword. But there is something therapeutic about breaking someone’s nose on your…”

  “You're saying we just attacked a fellow mutant!" They heard Mystique shout from the building that was their destination. The rge woman and the telepath blinked in surprise, but the two of them still pressed on.

  As they entered the building, they heard the mage say. "I also said that he could have the Cedra-gene, making him an Enhanced. I only know that something is helping him reach these conclusions that he has, because there is nothing in these notes and entries here, which expins what he has accomplished with these Newmen."

  Off to their left was Mystique and her son, between them was the ‘L’ shaped metal table, which was projecting holographic screens and keyboards for Nath’aniel and someone else could use. Shanna stood beside the mage. In her hands were the pages that had been on the table when she was here st.

  “Enhanced don’t work like that.” The shape-shifter argued.

  The mage continued to argue. “Yes they do, it just requires the right awakening agent…

  “Nath! Something is wrong with these beast-men.” Bass said as soon as she was inside. Then she let the cat woman back down on her own two legs.

  Betsy frowned but held her tongue. Despite wanting to chide the rge woman, she had told Nath'aniel that she would try and get along better with her. Since both of them were bedding the mage.

  The cat woman looked around confused, before saying. "This isn't where the Great One is. I thought you were taking me to him?"

  The mage looked the cat woman up and down, before asking. “What is wrong with them?”

  "We're not sure, but all but the one Murmur tagged is acting out of it." The rge woman expined to him.

  Betsy then added. “A little over three years ago, the Brotherhood attacked a business in France. It was basically a whore house. It was how such a business got our attention, they cimed to have an entire wing that only had mutant workers. Mystique confirmed that they had captured mutants, so we went in.'

  “What we didn’t know was that the thugs were drugging the girls. It was something new, which would make the girls agreeable and compliant, while also making them addicted to the drug. So even after we dealt with the criminals, and their boss and freed them. The girls wouldn't do anything unless we gave them more of the drug. Even after trying to help them in the end most of them went back to selling themselves.'

  "How these Newmen are currently acting, is very simir to how those women did.” She told him this, not with words, but with her telepathy. What would have taken several breaths and time to expin to him, she sent to him in an instant.

  She could have even shown him how the girls acted but she would have to link to him to do that, and she was still afraid of what she saw that st time she was in his head. Even so, he just nodded and asked them. "Have her sit on that stool."

  "No, I need to go to the Great One." the cat said before trying to slip past Basilisk, but with four arms and being head and shoulders taller than the feline, she didn't get very far.

  "We're worried that you may be sick," Mystique told her, by the time the cat woman turned to face this new speaker, the shape-shifter had changed her appearance. Now looked like a blue-furred mouse woman. "You don't want to be hindered in your aiding the Great One do you?"

  Betsy had to give it to the quick-thinking woman. Because the red-furred cat head nodded and obediently walked over to the designated stool and sat down.

  Nath’aniel was only a couple of steps behind her, and he quickly wrote the rune to cast his appraisal spell. Instead of the normal wide range of colors in the image that the spell showed them, the copy of the feline woman was in shades of grey.

  Betsy guessed this was because the mage had little information on the race that was sitting before him, but that didn’t stop him, as while the characters didn’t mean much to her, it was an open book to him as they were the written nguage of the mages.

  After a rather long moment, he frowned before suddenly holding out his hand. His emitter that was sitting on the table, rose into the air before it flew to his outstretched hand. He pressed the button to turn it on, and a green hourgss appeared above it. Once it spoke, the hourgss began to spin in pce.

  “Online, young master.”

  "I need a spiritual scan of the subject before me," Nath'aniel stated. The hourgss turned from green to pink, and a second ter a second image of the woman sat beside the first. The characters were rger to fill the space that the cat woman took up. As Betsy was about to ask him what was happening to the animal woman, he compined. "Of course he did."

  The mage took a step away, before he wrote a three rune spell into the air. The energy he wrote with was purple and pink and it hurt Betsy’s eyes to look at it. Once he was finished writing, he crushed the word.

  A second ter a bst of pink light shot the cat woman in the head. Knocking her off of the stool, she nded onto her back, with her legs in the air. No one was expecting that, so everyone froze at the sight. Betsy even felt the poor cat’s mind shut off at the assault.

  “Ahh…” the blue teleporting teen started to ask something.

  The mage interrupted the boy as he expined himself, while he removed the lingering images from the appraisal spell. "He brainwashed them. I noticed that their brains had a psychic charge, like someone was actively affecting them. However, the spirit scan revealed a compulsion and need to serve, I assume him, from her speech.'

  “If I do not remove this compulsion she will just continue to draw back into herself, eventually she will only have thoughts of him, until those thoughts turn to those of self-harm.”

  “Is there anything we can do for the rest of them?” Basilisk asked him.

  Betsy stares at the downed feline, as her mind starts to return. The telepath wonders if the woman heard what Nath’aniel had said, because angry thoughts were starting to stir in the feline’s mind.

  "I'm honestly not sure if my spell did the trick, I will have to look her over again, once her senses return. But from what I remember of the Betrayal, we would just release a stronger psychic effect to overpower the one the Atnteans used to lure us into ambushes." Nath'aniel expined.

  "That expins that," Shanna mutters. When some of the others looked at her, she added. "Murmur used her psychic overload on one of the knights right, well when I was fighting these Newmen, despite them clearly being birthed from animals, I couldn't feel a link like usually do with wildlife. But I could feel it in him when I met him. I couldn't understand it then, but maybe this brainwashing actually serves as a kind of shield for them."

  All the while Shanna expined what she had experienced, Betsy's attention was not on the others, but the still waking feline woman, whose thoughts of rage had simmered and shifted. The telepath poked at the mind, trying to find a solid thought and not just primal urges.

  As she felt the anger and frustration completely become drowned by another instinct, the telepath saw a clear image from the cat woman's mind. Betsy for a brief second saw the woman, Red Lion that was her name. She was seated at a table. In her arms was a bundle. The telepath saw that Red Lion's dress was down around her waist. The bundle was pressed to the cat woman's exposed teat, and the bundle was drinking from it.

  “Nath dose her!” Betsy shouted. They looked at her surprised and she reworded her order. “Put her to sleep now!” The telepath was quickly losing the feeling of their being a mind inside the Newman at all. As hormones were being made and were flooding the woman’s system.

  The mage quickly wrote a pair of green runes into the air, before he spped it towards the now rising woman. Red Lion got halfway up, before the green mist and light knocked her back out.

  Shanna smiled before saying. "Oh, I felt that."

  "What?" Mystique asked, still taking the appearance of a blue-furred mouse.

  “That girl is in heat, really bad.” The Lancer answered, and then she looked at the boy standing behind his mother and added. “Like hid your sons in the basement bad.”

  At that, the boy vanished in a puff of smoke.

  Once the smoke cleared, Nath'aniel states to the room. "Clearly these Newmen are a work in progress."

  Bass tilts her head before asking. “What do you mean?”

  The mage pulled the sidewise stool out from between the cat woman's legs so that she could y ft. Betsy noticed he didn't use the stool. He was just making the woman more comfortable. Then he answered the rge mutant. "Well, for one thing, they are not at all men. And before you ask, by that I mean human. If the others are anything like this one, they are evolved animals. A more than likely forced evolution at that.'

  "Additionally I think that he was using the brainwashing to just suppress things that he didn't want to think about, like families and children. After all, there wasn't a single child out there, so unless the ship had them all, I think it is a pretty safe bet that he just made more using animals from around here."

  “He didn’t use anything from the other beast-men from the Savage Lands?” Shanna asked him.

  He shook his head before saying. “No, all of the ‘beast-men’ of the Preserve have trace markers that hint back to the worlds and pnes of their origin. These newmen ck them completely, so they are completely terrestrial.”

  "Well, if they are just b experiments, then that is all the reason to just wipe them out," Mystique said as she shifted back to her normal form.

  Nath'aniel stared at the blue woman and crossed his arms before he replied to her statement. "All the more reason not to, this is a stable infant race. How will other people react to us, once it gets out that we just wiped them away? And trust me, news like that has a way of getting out."

  The mage wasn't the only one bothered by that suggestion, as Basilisk also crossed a pair of her arms. Meanwhile, her free lower on pointed at the Mystique accusingly, while she said. "You do that, Mys, and you're no different than the humans that oppress us mutants."

  “Well what do we do with them, because I don’t feel safe with them all compelled to serve him," Betsy stated. Then she rested her own hands on her hips before pointing out. "All it would take is one suggestion and they would all become rabid and fight to the death like the knights were.'

  “And I also don’t think it would be wise to let them just breed like animals, if they have cannibalistic tendencies.”

  “That is the question. What do we do with them?” Nath’aniel agreed.