Xaviers!

Cam was leaving one class on his way to another -- yes, people attended classes at Xaviers! His backpack with his books was somewhat oversized for him, and people were passing him in the hallway as he trudged.

"Ah, Mister Beckett? Do you have a moment?" Ashlie says as she spots him coming her way in the crowd.

"Oh boy. What is it now, headmistress?" he sighed, walking over to her.

"I couldn't help but notice that you... added a new student into the system."

Cam looked at Ashlie for a moment before responding.

"I'm pretty sure, by definition, anyone in the system is a student, yes?"

Ashlie chuckles. "In a way. Although usually they're entered by the staff, not through some backdoor. Quite impressive, really. I'm not sure I would have noticed if she hadn't shown up in my class. You should have told her to actually look like the picture in her file, it might have fooled me."

"Hrm? She didn't look like her picture? Well, that's strange.

You should really get your backdoors checked. It was far too easy to access."

"Apparently so. But even so, you used it to do good. Showing her she has a place at the school was rather genius. Has she told you who she is?"

"No. I was working on that, with a rather ingenious little device, but philistines broke it. I understand the telepathic brigade on campus ended up beating me to the punch, but you can rest assured, my method would have worked faster and more efficiently."

"Oh. Well that's excellent. I'm sure you understand then. Very well donedonedonedonedonedone--" Ashlie suddenly seizes up in the middle of the hallway.

"Connection to main server corrupt. Initiating system shutdown." a flat computer voice that kind of sounds like Ashlie's announces through her half-open mouth. "Failure in critical system components 21-A, 14-K, 2-B, 39-P,71X99J45L88" the voice speeds up until error messages are flowing into each other as she rattles them off faster than the previous one can end.

Cam stood there, blinking. "Uh...headmistress?

ASHLIE?


...Ctrl-Alt-Del?"

The stream of error messages stops, which might seem like a good thing. Maybe? But then Ashlie just slowly falls forward, frozen in the pose she held when something went wrong as she slams down on the hardwood floor like a mannequin someone pushed over.

Cam raised an eyebrow, and glanced around to see who saw that.

Grabbing one of ASHLIE'S arms, he began dragging her towards the nearest computer lab.

Ashlie is heavier than a woman of her build should be, but not ridiculously so, so Cam manages to drag her along as a phalanx of students watches with wide eyes.

"Move it! Out of my way! Science coming through!"

Cam dragged her into the computer lab, to the startled reaction of students. "Everyone who isn't an A-level genius, out of this room now! You're using up my oxygen. Gogogogo."

He quickly headed to one of the computers and began wrenching off the casing, gathering parts. His handy leatherman at his side, he began to go to work.

It's simple enough for someone as clever as Cam to peel off the layer of fake skin and figure out how to open up Ashlie's robotic skull to get to the processing core inside. It looks pretty fried, but the memory units nestled around it seem mostly okay.

Cam frowned at the unfamiliar tech.

"This will need some more glue," he mused, uncoupling protective clips and tying in some of the loose connections from the computer he was dismantling.

He could use the monitor and keyboard as input devices, but his plan from there was murky -- was ASHLIE still functioning and just needed to re-connect to the outside world? Could he access wherever her central consciousness matrix was by backchanneling data through the processors here? They looked fried; he'd probably need to come up with a workaround for that.

Well, one way or another, he could probably access this robot body, and that's one more robot body than he had a minute ago, so things were looking up, he mused, wiring in the uninterruptable power supply to several key points.

"You! There! I need your FitBit. The headmistress will reimburse you, I'm sure," he said, snatching it from one student's hands -- he was looking the the accelerator and the various components that allowed it to sync with the cloud. A bit of rekafoobling and they might provide enough boost to communicate with the central core. Or not! It was an experiment, who knows what would happen!

"Alright, c'mon..." he muttered, connecting one last power relay and attempting to link ASHLIE's output to the monitor. "Let's see what we've got, here..."

Tosh had been hurrying to respond to the alert when he saw people fleeing the computer lab. He stopped one to ask what was going on. The answer was alarming enough without considering the timing. Naturally he hurried into the lab.

"You heard the man, non-geniuses get out!" he told the stragglers before hurrying to Cam's side. "What've we got?"

"Apparently, the headmistress is a robot, not a cyborg."

"I know. But what happened? Remote connection loss or main system failure?"

With the processor fried even Cam has little chance to fix it on the spot but he does manage to connect enough of her to the computer that he amanges to off-load the actual computing on the poor machine. As a result what he gets on the screen is a very limited (and slow) terminal able to recall Ashlie's memory. Including a bunch of error-logs which are long and extensive, showing a main system emergency shutdown. What's probably also more interest is what he can dig up from just before that happened. Some kind of failure cascade relating to the systems at the Point, indicating that connections were being severed and Ashlie trying to calculate what the attackers' plan might be based on the systems being severed from the larger network.

Just as the words 'Possible Reactor Breach' pop up on the screen they can feel the ground rumble faintly. Out the window in the distance they can see the big satellite dish of the Point visible just above the trees. It's shaking ever so slightly from the tremors.

"OK, that's...that's not good. Reactors should, generally speaking, not breach.

Do you have access to fix it from here?" he asked, standing up and taking a quick inventory of the room, (figurative) gears in his head whirring.

As the two are working on extracting memories from Ashlie's half-fried chips the entire buildings shakes and a massive blasts blows out the windows as a giant fireball blooms in the distance where the Point used to be.

Cam was knocked off his feet by the shockwave, slamming into the wall behind them.

"Fix it? No. But I can probably use my access to reroute things so nothing else..." he said before the explosion bowled him over as well.

People had already been kinda peering into the room, curiously. That... stopped when the explosion rocked the building, but as everyone is slowly dusting themselves off people are either trying to run for safety or find a window to look out of. One of the handful of people pushing into the room to look out the window is Shari. For a moment she looks confused at seeing the headmistress on the floor with wires sticking out of her head but when she looks out the window that is blown from her mind.

"Oh no... oh no. Oh no no no no! They're here! No, that can't... how are they already here!?"

Tosh groaned as he pushed himself up, eyes widening as he saw the destruction.

"No..."

He scrambled to get his phone out of his backpack and patch into the comm network before realizing that was at the point and calling Haley.

"We... we have to go. They're coming for the rest of us." Shari panics, pointing at the two hulking shapes of green aliens, one of them sprouting black and white fur, walking down the road from the crater towards the mansion.

Cam rubbed the back of his head.

"Nnng.

Go. Move. Get out of here," Cam muttered, pulling himself to his feet.

Tosh's heart sagged when his girlfriend didn't answer. As he turned to face Shari, the time disc fell from his backpack. He looked down at it numbly.

Shari blinks when the piece of Skrull tech just falls out of Tosh's pocket. "What the... where'd you get this?" she asks, reaching down to pick it up. "This is a piece of our ship's engine."

"Talk later, go NOW," Cam said.

Outside, the weather began to take an ominous turn for the worse with a young woman hovering down into view over the road between the mansion and the approaching aliens. The wind picked up, pushing out towards the point.

Shari's words snapped Tosh out of most of his shellshock and he looked up.

"Some... some of the X-Men recovered it after your it was used to keep someone in suspended animation. I was... going to ask you about it."

"It's... some kind of time distortion field that... I don't even know." she says as she picks it up and makes for the door. "Makes the engine do things in a field of time... stuff."

Wanda Johansson wrote:Outside, the weather began to take an ominous turn for the worse with a young woman hovering down into view over the road between the mansion and the approaching aliens. The wind picked up, pushing out towards the point.

The sudden gust of wind slows down the two approaching figures at least momentarily as they raise their arms against the blowing wind and try to press on. One of the holds out their hand towards Wanda and ice gathers around it, growing out into a spear but it's slow as the wind keeps ripping away the moisture in the air before most of it can freeze.

Shari wrote:"It's... some kind of time distortion field that... I don't even know." she says as she picks it up and hurries after Cam. "Makes the engine do things in a field of time... stuff."

"I don't suppose it could turn back time?" he asked sadly as he followed.

Narrator wrote:The sudden gust of wind slows down the two approaching figures at least momentarily as they raise their arms against the blowing wind and try to press on. One of the holds out their hand towards Wanda and ice gathers around it, growing out into a spear but it's slow as the wind keeps ripping away the moisture in the air before most of it can freeze.

Holding a long, pointy object (even one made of ice) to the sky during a storm, might not be the best course of action. Wanda's eyes zero in on the point of the spear and she gets an look of intense concentration. The clouds rumble once and then a flash of light arcs down, poorly controlled, but she only needs to be close. The boom that follows is almost immediate.

Shari blinks, looks down at the disc in her hand, back at Tosh, over at Cam and back at the disc. "I don't know, but if it can make things slower maybe it can make things slower so hard they go the other way... Hell for all I know you two might make it happen even if it's technically impossible. Let's get to the roof!"

Outside the lightning strikes, shattering the ice lance and burning the ground around the Skrull holding it. He seems dazed but still on his feet. The other one on the other hand leaps forward, shifting into some kind of purple vaguely lion-shaped creature with huge fangs and short, jagged blades sticking out of it's back. In one leap it closes most oft he distance to Wanda, muscles tensing as it prepares another leap right at Wanda.