Chapter IV. The Mile High Club.  Kitty was in euphoria. She was at the controls of the SR-77 again, and she was thrilled to have saved the mission, especially after she had come so close to destroying it. And she was sure the Professor would be happy to have someone like Peter on the team.

  This time Scott was administering her pilot training, which was a lot more pleasant than a session with Mr. Logan. She liked Mr. Logan and certainly trusted him, but he wasn’t much fun to be around. Scott even let her disengage the autopilot and fly manually for a while, choosing her own course and everything.

  Peter was standing behind the pilot console, watching everything with interest. His usual mode of transportation had been inside a metal sphere with no windows. Or anything else other than a seat. During the Apocalypse showdown, he had flown in a regular transport with the team sent to Egypt, but that was a SHIELD aircraft, not the Blackbird.

  It gave Kitty a kick that he could see her in total control of a supersonic transport. Almost hypersonic, but the Blackbird couldn’t quite reach Mach 5. He seemed duly impressed that someone her age could do this, even if under supervision.

  Scott was on the comm unit, briefing the Professor on what had happened on the mission, while still keeping an eye on what she was doing. Finally he disconnected. “The Professor is happy with the outcome of the mission and is looking forward to the debriefing. Kitty, he wanted me to congratulate you on your part in making the mission a success. And Peter, he is certainly willing to give you a chance with the X-Men, assuming the deep probe checks out. At the very least you can stay at the mansion until you get yourself together, even if you decide not to join.”

  “This is good news,” Peter said. “I thank the Professor.”

  “Kitty, plot a new course for Dallas. The Professor says that Amara needs a ride.”

  “She’s back from South America?”

  “Yeah. She got as far as DFW, but her connecting flight was cancelled, and she’s having a hard time rebooking. Everything is full, so we’re going to pick her up. And since we’re going to be entering the regular traffic control system so we can land at the airport, take us out of stealth mode. Now that the mission is over, there’s no longer a need for secrecy. Ever since the Sentinel incident, the authorities know about the X-Jet. They just don’t always know where we are going. But now we’re just picking up a friend.”

  Kitty was excited that Amara was joining them. She cared a great deal for everyone at the Institute, but the former Bayville Sirens had a special bond. She adored Amara, and was always a little jealous that Tabitha was closer to her. But then, Amara might feel the same way about her relationship with Jean.

  Now that the Blackbird was no longer in stealth mode, Kitty contacted air traffic control so that it could be added to the system. The controllers made no comment about the reported airspeed or the fact that a teenage girl was talking to them. They had been trained to expect pretty much anything from a callsign belonging to the X-Men, the FF, the Avengers, or SHIELD.

  Scott allowed Kitty to fly most of the way to Dallas, but took over as they entered the landing pattern. “Sorry, Kitty, you aren’t quite ready for a real landing yet.” Read the rest of this entry »

Chapter III. Colossus.

  A few minutes later, Kitty had resumed her stroll down the alley. The tracker indicated that Peter had moved, but not so far that she needed to change course. It was still worthwhile to stay in the alley for several blocks, until the tracker indicated that she was even with his position and needed to cut over.

  She reported in, but Scott answered this time instead of Mr. Logan. She gave him the information about the fleabag hotel.

  “Good work, Kitty,” Scott said. “We have him under surveillance right now, but knowing his permanent location will be a big help if he gives us the slip. We should be able to pick him up again.”

  “You know where he is?” Kitty asked. “Should I like follow the tracker? Does it have his current location?”

  “It does now. The location was off a little because he moved after the last time he used his powers. But we updated it manually when we found him. He’s in a titty bar called the Candy Store. Jean and Logan are already inside, but I was waiting for you. It’s hard to communicate from the inside because of the noise level.”

  “A titty bar? What the hell kind of Magneto business would be going on in a place like that?”

  “If we knew, we wouldn’t be following him. He appears to be watching the show, even tipping the dancers. We assume he’s waiting to meet someone and is putting on a show, acting like a typical drunken pussy hound. Logan is at a table on the other side of the place. Jean is pretending to be a waitress or something.”

  “What do I do? Nobody’s gonna let me in a place like that, not at my age.”

  “Not if you go in through a door. Jean says that the women’s dressing room is in the northeast corner of the building. Just go through the wall and see if you can find a waitress uniform your size. With the crummy lighting in places like that, you should be able to get away with it. But keep your distance from Rasputin, though. He knows you.” He gave her the street address. “I’m going inside now. Are you set?”

  “Got it. See you inside.”

  A short time later Kitty was standing in front of the Candy Store. It didn’t look quite as dumpy as she expected. After getting her bearings, she found the designated corner. She took a quick look around, then closed her eyes, whipped off her sunglasses, and stuck her head through the wall. There were a couple of women in the dressing room, but they weren’t looking her way. She noted the elevation of the floor and quickly phased the rest of the way into the room… Read the rest of this entry »

Chapter II. Waikiki.

  Kitty strolled down the sidewalk with the tourists, pretending to be interested in the contents of the shop windows. And she actually was, to an extent. They had some nice stuff.

  However, she wasn’t here to shop, so she looked at the swimsuits and such on the fly. She checked her direction finder watch and confirmed she was headed the right way. Since this was a surveillance mission, she had changed into street clothes before being dropped on top of one of the Waikiki hotels. This sure was nicer than slogging around in the bowels of those fucking pyramids.

  Forge had created the tracking equipment for the professor. It used the Avenger comm satellites to coordinate with Cerebro back at the mansion. The sats were designed by Reed Richards, built by Stark Enterprises, and launched by SHIELD. The Avengers allowed the X-Men a percentage of the bandwidth, for official business only.

  Every five minutes, Kitty’s watch would send off an inquiry to Cerebro via the sats, asking for the last known position of the target mutant. The watch would then compare that with Kitty’s own position and give her a heading, in the form of an arrow. Scott, Jean, and Mr. Logan, who had all started from different points, were also converging on the target from different directions.

  It wasn’t foolproof, because Cerebro could not detect the mutant unless he was using his powers. However, Kitty had changed direction a couple of times, indicating that he was doing so sporadically.

  The other piece of Forge-supplied hardware was in her ear, a high-gain comm link. The Avenger sat was providing the repeater capability.

  And of course Jean’s telepathy was an additional comm path, though it was a star configuration, and all traffic had to relay through her. The hardware comm was point to point, so Jean was a backup.

  Kitty heard Mr. Logan’s voice. “Position report.”

  The Blackbird computer responded with the coordinates of all five mutants, the target and the X-Men who were tracking him. After that the team members themselves reported in. She waited for her turn. “Shadowcat. Position confirmed. On track.”

  The mutant they were tracking was Piotr Nikolaievitch Rasputin, AKA Peter AKA Colossus. For a Magneto stooge, he wasn’t really that bad a guy. Not like that vicious fucker Sabretooth. Or that smug bastard Gambit. Or the psycho Pyro.

  He wasn’t really evil at all. Kitty had spent some time with him down in the pyramid and when they weren’t dodging those huge killer mechanical statues, he had told her that he worked for Magneto only because of extortion. Basically his family was held hostage.

  The team really wasn’t after him, but was trying to get a line on Magneto. Helmet Boy himself couldn’t be tracked by Cerebro so they had no choice but to go after the Acolytes, hoping they would provide leads. You’d think that Magneto would have learned his lesson after the Apocalypse thing, but he was apparently up to his old shit.

  Kitty noticed that the street was starting to veer off in the wrong direction, away from Colossus. And it was a long way to the next block. She considered just heading directly toward the target in a straight line, ignoring all obstacles, but she decided that a public display of mutant powers would not be in keeping with a surveillance mission.

  She headed on toward the corner, picking up the pace. But after a short distance she came across an alley, and it seem to be going in a good direction. The way the street was curving, the cross street might take her off on a tangent.

  She hesitated for a few seconds. The alley went straight a short distance, then curved off. The curve was in a good direction, but she could not see what the alley contained, or who it contained, or whether it was went on through to the next street. If it was a dead end she would have to phase after all. Read the rest of this entry »

Chapter I. Cross Country.

  Kitty was nervous as hell. This was her first time at the controls of the real X-Jet, though she’d spent dozens of hours in the simulator. Unlike Bobby and the other male recruits, who always started making crazy-ass maneuvers and crashed, Scott had told her that she was progressing well. She’d only crashed a few times.

  Of course now there was more at stake than getting a “game over” and a bad score. If she fucked up now the game would really be over. Bits and pieces of her and her teammates would be scattered over a wide area of the landscape below. Impact at Mach 4 tended to do that.

  But she wasn’t alone. Mr. Logan was in the other position. He didn’t seem to be paying attention, reading a Hustler, but she knew he was monitoring her every move, and would step in if she did something really stupid.

  She was determined to make sure that he had no reason to do anything other than just sit there. Kurt had learned how to do this. So could she.

  The two of them were very competitive, being the youngest members of the real team. Well, Evan was younger, but he had freaked out and wasn’t on the team any more. He was slogging around in sewers these days, hanging out with those creepy Morlocks. Kitty knew it was bad to think about other mutants that way, given that ordinary humans considered all of them weird and creepy, but she couldn’t help it.

  She jumped when Mr. Logan spoke for the first time since she had taken the controls. “Mind your panel, Half Pint.”

  Damn it, she thought in anguish. I’m already fucking up!

  She hurriedly looked at the tactical display. All of the little blips represented other aircraft in the vicinity. Sure enough, one of them had turned yellow and was blinking. She touched the screen there, and a data readout appeared. It was a Lear Jet, bound for Chicago. They were far from the regular lanes, so contacts tended to be smaller planes like this.

  On their present course, they would be passing too close to it. Of course, no one could detect them, but there was still the sonic shock wave, which was pretty fucking powerful at Mach 4. Even though they were at a much higher altitude, it would give even an airliner quite a thump, might break something on a smaller plane.

  Kitty had a few minutes to make a decision, so she carefully evaluated the available avoidance paths. Finally she dialed in a course change, plus a second time-delayed correction to get them back on course after going around the Lear. She took a deep breath and hit “execute”, fully expecting Mr. Logan to yell at her and cancel it.

  But he just continued flipping through the pages. She started breathing again.

  It continued on like this for another half hour or so. Mr. Logan switched magazines a couple of times, while she weaved the SR-77 around three more slow movers.

  Finally, Mr. Logan spoke again. “I’ll take it from here, Half Pint. We’re coming up on the coast. Traffic’s building up. You can have more flight time later.”

  “Yes, sir,” she said. She leaned back, intending to observe, but he told her to go on back into the cabin.

  Disappointed, she obeyed. “Ya did good,” he said, which made her feel a little better. She looked around the cabin, but Scott and Jean weren’t where they had been when she took over the controls. They weren’t in the cabin at all. They had to be in the back compartment. Where else could they be? Only Kurt could teleport somewhere else, and the altitude was too high for that anyway. Read the rest of this entry »

I am going to update design for my site Onlinesuperheroes Here is some sketches

Please write me at comments if you would like to see anybody special =)