By Raven Adams

Bobby heard the rumble before he felt it, and even when he felt it, it didn't seem bad enough to do any damage. But then again, he wasn't sure exactly what it was supposed to do, and Lizzie still hadn't come out yet.

He moved over to the fence, ready to jump over it in a moment to go get her, but the building started to rumble and crack. He jumped back from the fence and covered his head as it fell to the ground in a matter of seconds, concrete and wood flying everywhere.

After the rumbling stopped, and the dust cleared, all that was left of "McCloud's Toy Factory" was the fence around it and a pile of dust. Bobby's mouth dropped open, not because of the destruction that just one little black box with a yellow button had done, but because of the fact that Lizzie hadn't come out. A breeze bowing his hair in his eyes, he grabbed hold of the fence, and started to climb it, when a hand grabbed hold of the back of his shirt and pulled him back down.

"That might not be such a great idea, Drake. You see, my partner, he's been working on those things for a long time, but some times there are some aftershocks. I'd hate to see you get hurt."

Bobby turned around and scanned the area. Nothing but the guards he had knocked out. "Lizzie?" He asked the air, and suddenly right before him she appeared, her face right in front on his, upside down. A pair of black wings that came from out of her back flapping and creating the little breeze he had felt.

He was starring at her wings, so she did an upside down U-turn and landed on her feet. "The best thing Sinister ever did to me was giving me these wings. They can go from zero to sixty in five seconds flat." She said with pride, and shook them, shinning black feathers flew everywhere. Bobby caught one in his hands. "The only problem is that every time I'm around the Green Death, they start to molt." She grinned at him, but it disappeared when she saw the evil look he was giving her. She didn't have to read his thoughts or since his feelings to know that he was mad as hell at her. She had forgotten that Drake wasn't like her partner who would know and feel that she was okay.

Her shoulders sagged as she pulled her wings into her back and she hung her head. Her side took this moment to start to hurt, and she drooped to the ground.

"Rogue?" Remy could barely whisper the name and he got to his knees. The room was spinning, and he had a killer headache. He tried to make since of what was around him, when he realized that his hands were tied behind his back.

Gambit relaxed his arms as much as he could. When he was a thief still living in New Orleans, he had discovered that if you just relaxed enough, then you could get out of any ropes, no matter how tight. Now, if he could just relax a little more, witch was hard after realizing that the people who had ambushed them had taken Rogue, he could loosen up the ropes enough to wiggle out of them.

Ten minuets later, his wrests sore and cut, he finely got free. "Dey n't as smart as dey t'ink." He mumbled coming to Storm's side.

"Remy! You are free!" She cried in delight as he started on her ropes.

"Course, Stormy. Dere's not'ing dat a t'ief can' get out of." He grinned at her.

Soon all of the X-Men, a little bruised and a few numbers less, were loose.

"Where's Jubilee?" Wolverine asked sniffing the air.

"I can't find Jonothon or Angelo." Emma said moving around to the back of the jet to look there. "Where are they?"

"Rogue and Jean are gone too."

"Dis off de subject, but 'ow did we get back t' de mansion?"

Kert jammed his fingers in his ears and waited patiently for Forge to finish his lecture on why he shouldn't have taken apart the dishwasher again. Of course, this wasn't like last time when the dishwasher had blown up. That wasn't my fault. He reminded himself, Deven's the one who put the bubble bath in it.

Nope. This time when Nina had gone to unload the thing, she had found out that her great-great-grandmother's white china (Which shouldn't have been in there in the first place, thought Kert.) had become periwinkle blue. Needless to say, she wasn't very happy with her daughter's partner and had called Forge to come and talk with him again. As if it would help.

"Are you listening to me, Torch?" Forge asked suddenly in his face. Kert jumped back a little, a hard thing to do considering he was laying on a couch. "All right, that's it. You've got firewood detail. Right now, get out!"

Kert mumbled something under his breath as he got up from the couch.

"Even as leader, you still get in trouble, huh Kert?" A young man was leaning in the doorway, his teal eyes shining with mischief. He was playing with a long black feather with a blue stripe down the center that matched his hair colors.

"My foundling is back." Forge smile.

"Deven!" Kert jumped over the coffee table to get hold of the younger man and give him a big bear hug. "Man it's good to see you! You've been gone way too long this time!"

"Well, I'm not going to be gone like that anymore. I found my parents." Deven said dislodging himself from his sister's partner.

"Did you?" Asked Forge. "Your search is over. I am happy for you."

He made a rode noise. "I'm not I should have listened to you, Forge. Some things are better to be left in the dark." His eyes turned cold for a moment, then lit up again. "No matter, I have Liz, she's all the family I need. Were is she and Shadow anyway?"

"Forge sent her to the X-Men." Kert said making a rode noise himself.

Forge grabbed his arm and spun him around. "What did you say?"

"I said you sent Rave to the X-Men." Kert looked at him strangely, something wasn't right.

"I didn't send Lizzie to the X-Men. I wouldn't do that. I would not make her confront ... wait a minute, what's she doing there?"

To think that something could have happened to her while he was too far to help ... only one other time had she needed him and he hadn't been there, and piece of the sunshine in her heart had been lost. It had seemed to come back when she had seen Gambit the first time she had gone to the X-Men. If something...

"Forge, how could you send her to the X-Men?" Deven screamed. His heart was pounding so hard Kert could hear it. "We haven't made sure yet that Gambit didn't send her to Sinister!"

"Are you sure she was sent to McCloud's?" He asked Kert ignoring Deven. Kert nodded. "I haven't had the time to tell Conrad, and Jackson doesn't know..." He said more to himself then to the boys. Kert and Deven became quiet. They both had a bad feeling that the X-Men and Gambit wasn't what Forge was talking about. Kert, now in his leader mode, turned to Deven, "Go find Traveler and met us back here in an hour. I'll get Nina."

Bobby drove the car back to the mansion, every once and a while looking over to make sure Lizzie was still breathing. She hadn't said anything else to him since they had left the toy factory, but Bobby could tell that she was in some kind of pain.

He shifted uncomfortable thinking of the gun in the back seat rapped up in a skirt. Lizzie had said that that stuff, the Green Death she had called it, wouldn't leak out of it's chamber, but he wasn't so sure.

"Where did that stuff come from?" He asked shifting his eyes toward Lizzie slightly.

Without hesitating, as if she had been waiting for the question, she answered. "A young man came to CMS almost a year ago, asking for help in stopping his father from keeping mutants as slaves. This man had cut out his own daughter's tongue for calling him father, and that was because she is a mutant. He created Mutidenoxide, or the Green Death as his son called it, to sell to the FOH.

"It seeps into your blood stream and slowly eats away your insides, starting with the lungs. There are three forms of it. One is a liquid that has to be injected into someone by a needle. It's the slowest of the three, taking a very long time to work and it is also the most painful. I know this for a fact.

"The second it a gas, you breath it in without even knowing it, it's colorless, tasteless, and it doesn't smell. This won't hurt you unless you've been in a closed in room with it for hours. And the third form is what we've got back there. Shoot it at a human and it goes right through them, shoot it at a mutant, and they stop breathing instantly. As you saw back there, it's the fastest of the three, and most of the time you don't feel a thing. Unless, of course, somehow your lungs start working again, then you feel lots of pain."

After a moment of silence, Bobby ask, "What happened? With the guy's son I mean?"

She turned and looked at her reflection in the window. "Brian. His name was, Brian. Striker killed him. Two days after he married a woman name Rose Loneson."

A black van with dark tented windows and no license plate, pulled up in front of the Salem Center Police Department and stopped. Two men jumped out of the back and started up the stairs.

Kert and Deven were dressed exactly alike in black pinstripe suites, a white shirt, and the same exact tie with CMS stitched on it in blue letters. Both were wearing dark sunglasses, and they both had one hand in their pockets displaying the guns on their hips. They looked like twins in their dress other then the fact that Deven wore an image inducer on his belt, so his blue striped hair and his pointed ears couldn't be seen, and he couldn't labeled a mutant.

"Putting new bugs up in McCloud's office... Why? What's wrong Forge? Is Lizzie okay?" Kert was starting to get upset. It was hard enough to be this far away from her, not knowing what she's thinking, feeling, or doing. They hadn't been this far apart in a long time, and it was like a part of himself was gone. Their minds were linked together, and sometimes they were even like one person instead of two.

Together they pushed open the door and marched into the building. Everyone in the department stopped everything and looked at them in surprise. One officer who was carrying a cup of coffee in his hand, was watching them instead of where he was going, and ran into a wall, spilling it all over himself.

**I feel like one of the Blues Brothers.** Deven "said" telepathically to his companion.

**These people wouldn't believe we work for the government if we walk in here in T-shirts and jeans. So shut up and bear with it.** His leader sent back without even looking at him.

**I know what we're going to do, but are these cops going to just let us walk out of here with Jack?**

A slight smile touched Kert's lips, but then was gone. **Watch and learn.** He opened the door to the interrogation room and walked in.

"Hey now! You can't go in there!" The nearest cop marched over to them and Deven pushed his open wallet into his face.

"We're from the 298 section of the FBI. One of our agents is here interrogating an escaped felon and we have authorization to take him back with us. Now excuse me, Officer, I have a job to do." Deven turned, walked into the interrogation room, and slammed the door in the officer's face.

Nina Jentree was fidgeting in the drive's seat of the black van as she waited for Deven and Kert to come back out. Forge hadn't told her why she had to come, but she knew without him saying anything. He was sitting in the back, cursing to himself. Quinn Gallagher, AKA Traveler, sat in the passenger seat sulking because he wasn't back at CMS Head Quarters with the others. Nina silently wished she could be there too.

They hadn't told the other's where they were going, or even that they were leaving. That was Forge's idea, and she knew why he had said for it to be so. She just didn't like it.

"Here they come." He said from the back as he opened the door, and four people got in. "Jack, if you ever do anything you father orders you to do without asking me first again, I will personally make sure that your 'bosses' know that you've been selling secrets to the cops."

"Actually, thanks to my leader and my partner here, I won't be able to go back to work for my bosses. They'll kill me on sight." He grinned and leaned up to the front seat to give his mother a kiss on the cheek. "You should have seen them Forge." He said sitting back down as the van started forward. "They walked in there like Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones, pushed Shadow out of the way, and told the detective who was interrogating me that I was coming with them. He told them no in a few colorful terms, and Dev decked him."

Forge looked over to Deven in surprise.

The young man turned off the image inducer and pulled the tie off from around his neck. He gave Forge his "What me?" look and said, "Hey, it was affective! We got him out didn't we? Oh and Kert, what was it you said about 'watch and learn?'"

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