Xaviers!

Siberia wrote:In the distance, the slim profile of the ships had been widening out as they turned, but now a lot of their systems seemed to have ceased functioning after the EMP blast. It would be a bit before the hardened systems recovered, but Shatterstar could imagine what Siberia's response was going to be once the guns were working again.

Thresher wrote:Thresher brought up an arm and a shield of translucent red hexagons shimmered into existence just in time to catch the blast. The blast pushed him back, deck squealing as clawed metal feet tear at it.

"My turn," he growled. The weapon mounted on his shoulder takes aim and fires a barrage of laser fire up at the flying woman.

Shatterstar lights up even brighter as the laser barrage slams into her, knocking her out of the air for a brief moment. She catches herself, smoking faintly, and immediately flies off to the side, strafing Thresher and blasting dozens of smaller beams his way to keep him occupied for a moment.

"You might want to consider abandoning ship!" she shouts at the X-Men fighting below her. "There should be a helicopter somewhere on board, probably below the landing pad! Once Admiral Siberia gets the fleet back up and running she's going to blow this ship apart!"

Sam grunts as she's spun about, scrabbling with her claws on the metal decking to recover her footing.

"Nnnh... alright, show of hands on who can fly a helicopter?"

She tenses and tries a shoulder rush towards the landing pad.

Narrator wrote:These guys are tough, but they're not giant-shark strong. One of them goes flying over the railing while another two get knocked down and into some of their fellow cavemen. Still, there's a lot of them and another three advance on Tosh and start pelting him with their weapons.

"Ow! Hey! Watch it!" he yelped as he took the pummeling. He slammed his fists into the deck, hoping to knock the cavemen off of their feet.

Haley bobbed and weaved to avoid the blows from the spear and the other guy, throwing out an angry blast of telekinetic force at the one who hadn't yet tried to make a kabob of her with his spear, hopefully knocking him back.

"...I've spent two hours in the Danger Room trying to learn how to fly the quinjet?" Haley replied to Sam.

She wasn't great at multitasking though, so the sweep caught her completely off guard, and she fell flat on her back, hard, knocking the wind out of her, her eyes going wide at the beast man looming over her.

Shatterstar wrote:Shatterstar lights up even brighter as the laser barrage slams into her, knocking her out of the air for a brief moment. She catches herself, smoking faintly, and immediately flies off to the side, strafing Thresher and blasting dozens of smaller beams his way to keep him occupied for a moment.

"You might want to consider abandoning ship!" she shouts at the X-Men fighting below her. "There should be a helicopter somewhere on board, probably below the landing pad! Once Admiral Siberia gets the fleet back up and running she's going to blow this ship apart!"

"Get Conduit before that happens or I eat whoever survives!" Thresher commanded. He kept focusing on not getting fried, blocking and moving towards cover. Every now and then he fired a few solid rounds in her direction from his arm mounted gun.

Samantha McManus wrote:Sam grunts as she's spun about, scrabbling with her claws on the metal decking to recover her footing.

"Nnnh... alright, show of hands on who can fly a helicopter?"

She tenses and tries a shoulder rush towards the landing pad.

Haley Crusek wrote:Haley bobbed and weaved to avoid the blows from the spear and the other guy, throwing out an angry blast of telekinetic force at the one who hadn't yet tried to make a kabob of her with his spear, hopefully knocking him back.

"...I've spent two hours in the Danger Room trying to learn how to fly the quinjet?" Haley replied to Sam.

She wasn't great at multitasking though, so the sweep caught her completely off guard, and she fell flat on her back, hard, knocking the wind out of her, her eyes going wide at the beast man looming over her.

One of the cavemen steps up and raises a nasty-looking club above his head, ready to smash her face in when he's tackled by a giant hairy beast and is thrown to the ground.

Toshiro Narumi wrote:"Ow! Hey! Watch it!" he yelped as he took the pummeling. He slammed his fists into the deck, hoping to knock the cavemen off of their feet.

Most of the attackers are knocked back when the blow slams into the metal of the deck with a massive *CLANG*, electricity crackling out from the impact. There's still some stragglers but between Sam's charge and Tosh's blow they got a fairly decent shot at getting to the flight deck, which doubles as horizontal hangar doors and are conveniently already partially open thanks to Conduit blasting the hell out of it. It also looks like it probably won't move as intended anymore, the metal bend and twisted and blocking in the helicopter sitting beneath it.

Meanwhile Thresher is fortunately distracted and also moving in the opposite direction. How the hell he expects to fit into the stairwell is another question, although possibly one with an obvious answer considering his footsteps already leave dents and gouges in the ship's metal.

Shatterstar meanwhile seems to consider her duty to help the X-Men fulfilled with that warning and is purely focusing on blasting Thresher's shots out of the air, apparently stalling for time.

Bruce bashed a few cavemen aside as he ran to the hangar doors. "Haley! Tear those doors open! I'll cover you!"

"And where's Will?!"

There are a few explosive puffs of smoke from one of the battle group, the Lehnsherr if Shatterstar had to guess, and huge sprays of water erupt on the near side of the ship as the ranging shots find the water.

Shatterstar wrote:Shatterstar meanwhile seems to consider her duty to help the X-Men fulfilled with that warning and is purely focusing on blasting Thresher's shots out of the air, apparently stalling for time.

"NOW PEABRAINS!" he roared, kicking an unlucky minion down the stairs as he reached them.

Her diaphragm finally beginning to cooperate and allow her breathe after getting the wind knocked out of her, and no longer in immediate danger of getting smashed by a club, Haley did a kick-up* back onto her feet and locked her eyes on the hangar doors that Tosh was running towards. She broke into a sprint to close the distance a bit and skidded to a halt to plant herself a bit. She grit her teeth, raised her arms in front of her, and made a yanking motion with her arms to try and drag the huge doors open.

*(possibly aided a bit by subtle use of her TK, but she'd never admit it)

Sam turns about and starts running interference so Haley can concentrate.

The hangar/flight-deck groans as metal grinds against metal on distorted tracks. At first nothing seems to happen except the whole door slowly deforming ever so slightly until suddenly, with a shrieking tearing sound the remains of the hangar door comes loose and flies overboard, flipping over twice before landing in the water with a tremendous crash. In the now open section sits a helicopter, just waiting to be boarded.

Will, panicking, tried to weave his way through traffic to get to the chopper.

"Bad bad bad bad bad! Bad! Bad bad!"

"...okay, Will's got the gist of things."

"EVERYBODY IN!"

Haley doubled over panting, hands on her knees after she saw the door go flying.

"Ah fuck my head..." she grumbled as she pushed herself upright and ran with the others towards the chopper.

"...are...we...are we being serious about me trying to fly this thing?" she asked, not seeing anyone else making an obvious move towards the pilot's seat.

The first of the on-target shells struck high on the command tower, wrecking the bridge in a brilliant fireball.

"Well, SOMEONE better do it, or this guy's gonna get antsy."

Haley flinched away from the exploding tower, eyes wide. "Hooooooly shit. Okay. Okay. I've got this," she tried to reassure the others and herself as she yanked open the door and hopped into the pilot's seat. She pulled down a headset and put it over her ears and covered her mouth with her hands while she looked at the dizzying array of controls in front of her.

"Everyone...uh....buckle up," she said, as the last of her teammates boarded and she started flipping switches, occasionally closing her eyes and trying to remember the calm computer instructor voice during the training she'd sat through.

Human Tosh, because hulking shark-men don't fit in helicopters, tried to not sound nervous as he said, "You can do this Haley."

"I certainly couldn't."

After swatting away a couple cavemen, Sam shifts down and boards, strapping in.

"Anything's better than being sunk by a battleship."

The helicopter controls are at least a little similar to the QuinJet. And honestly, probably a bit simpler. The chopper had been guarded from the EMP blast a little bit so the more robust systems are still functional. All the fancy weapons on it seem to be out of commission for now, but the rotors begin to spin up and the steering-wheel/joystick is mostly analogue anyway. It takes some trial and error but finally the helicopter begins to rise into the air. Two of the cavemen don't seem too happy with that fact and jump to cling to the landing rails to try and climb up into the thing as Haley precariously balances it in the air.

As the helicopter takes off, more shells strike the ship and the explosives rip holes in various things that the ship probably needs to keep functioning or even floating.

Shatterstar's radio finally crackles back to life and also magically seems to come over the radio in the helicopter, although the voice is speaking in Russian, "<Shatterstar, what is your situation?>"

Will stretched one hand out long and twisty, and punched one of the dangling cavemen in the face.

The caveman might have expected someone leaning out to deal with him, but he didn't anticipate that to be just a fist on a twisting arm punching him right in the face and suddenly he finds his hands are no longer clinging to the helicopter. With a surprised grunt he goes tumbling down into the waves.

Passing the fallen caveman by in the air is Shatterstar, coming up alongside the helicopter. "Good on you, you made it! I'll let them know you're coming." she shouts at them before the radio crackles to life and her attention turns back to the ship and the voice on the radio.

"<About to finish them off. Thresher and company ported in, but I don't have visual on him anymore. Feels like it'd be asking to much to be rid of both him and Conduit in one day, but you got some potential allies incoming who claim they managed to take out the later by themselves.>" she responds as she takes up position a good hundred yards away and above the reeling ship. The glow around her begins to intensify, taking a good half a minute to just gather up energy while the ship begins to take on water until she's like a miniature sun hovering above the ocean. The next moment a torrent of energy cuts through the air and slams into the side of the ship, slowly tearing away at the red-hot glowing metal as it slowly burns through hull-plating and bulkhead. At some point she seems to hit ammo storage or a missile battery and with a final explosion the ship tears in two, both halves beginning to sink as the helicopter approaches the safety of the Russian fleet. Here and there small flashes of blue can be seen in the waves as a handful of cavemen are teleported away.

"The British military is going to be so pissed," Tosh lamented.

"Well...


Shit."

Haley remained rigid in her seat, wide-eyed as she tried to remain calm and pilot the thing effectively.

It's a bit of a wobbly ride, but thankfully the weather is nice and calm and she doesn't have too far to go. Soon the fleet comes into proper view and with it the aircraft carrier Admiral Kuznetsov. It makes for a nice and big landing surface, even though by the looks of some of the people on deck they're annoyed about the random helicopter setting down in the middle of the flight deck and not the designated heli-pad. In general the looks the deck crew are giving them are dubious at best but at least they're not being openly aggressive.

Also on deck is an armored humanoid figure made entirely of ice and a potentially familiar, if somewhat older, figure looking down from one of the windows on the bridge.

"Well, they're not trying to blow us up. That's good, right?"

"Any landing you can walk away from, right?" She says as she steps out onto the flight deck.

"Wait, is that...?"

She looks in puzzlement at the admiral.

"Admiral Siberia." Shatterstar says as she sets down next to the Helicopter and salutes the ice-construct almost a little too snappy to be entirely genuine. "You know her?"

The construct returns the salute, though the figure in the bridge window does not.

"...maybe?"

"Okay, weird question but... what year is it?"

Tosh stepped out next to her. He followed Sam's gaze and groaned. Teleportation, this Order nonsense, the shark guy, and now...

"Shiiiit..."

"It's 2016." Shatterstar says with an undertone of "What else would it--" Her eye narrows when she spots Tosh stepping out of the helicopter.

"Haywire!" she says, raising her hand towards Tosh which immediately begins to glow. "You're with The Order!" she addresses the rest of them "I should have known better not to buy that story about Conduit! What is this, some kind of ploy to infiltrate the fleet!? Did you think we wouldn't recognize him?"

It took several moments for Haley to release her grip on the control stick and for her to peel off the headset she had been wearing. By the time she'd regained a modicum of composure and stepped out of the chopper, she caught Shatterstar's answer and sudden threat towards her...boyfriend? Was Tosh her boyfriend? Whatever, he was cute and she liked him and didn't like the thought of him getting blasted in the face. She stepped up in front of him.

"Hey! Fugly Bitch! Back off. His name is Tosh, and he's not in whatever the fuck the godddamned order is!" Haley shouted, enhancing her intimidation factor a bit with her telepathy.

"Recognize WHO? I'm all twisted up now," Will complained.

"...wait, you recognize him?"

"Did you... ah... not recognize him when he turned into a shark?"

"Because that's what he does."

"Does Grandmaster Haywire not turn into a shark?"

"...how many people that turn into sharks can there be?"