Institutionalized

INSTITUTIONALIZED CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT (NC-17)
Disclaimers Apply

A/N Goddess Foxfeather, Queen of Mad Plotbunnies and BUSIEST WOMAN ALIVE (tm)...stop me before I tat again! I'm a madwoman! InterNutter, TC and Maxwell Pink make me all goofy and giddy b/c they archive. :) Readers/Reviewers: All the critters have gone into hiding...I'd be wary. They seem to enjoy attacking ankles when you least suspect it...


"Ya know," Remy sighed, resigned for the moment to the situation, "I been tinkin' dat when we outta here, I need ta start hangin' out wid different folks...y'all are bad for my health!"
"Ow!" Jubilee cried out, pulling at her restraints again. "Damn it!"
"Cherie, if ya quit fightin' it, you ain't gonna get shocked."
The bed-like restraining systems ran the length of the room but were sparsely populated. Jubilee, Amara, Paige, Remy, Lance and Beast were each bound to the beds by Magneto's invention, shocked with varying levels of electricity every time they so much as breathed too deeply. It was becoming, as Beast said, tedious. Paige made a humming noise as if in deep thought and said, seemingly apropos to nothing, "Wood?"
Beast rolled his eyes. "Might burn olintlinter under the force of the shock..."
Lance tried to stretch his cramping feet and hissed as a jolt ran through his body. "Now what do we do?"
Beast sighed shallowly and said, "Well, escape I supposed. Though patience is a virtue and we might best be served by waiting. Magneto is not one for idle torture...I say we wait a bit and see what happens. We may be presented with an opportunity to escape without unnecessary risk to life or limb."
"With due due respect," Amara said gruffly, "bullshit. I'm not waiting around for some looney to decide what he's going to do with us!"
"Rubber!" Paige cried. "Rubber!"
Beast smiled. "I was hoping you'd get to that before long..."
Jubilee snorted in frustration. "What the Hell are you talking about, Paige? You inhale fertilizer back on the farm or something?"
Paige, sounding as cold as she could, which was not very, said, "No, you doof, I won't get shocked if I'm rubber. The restraints aren't that tight...just enough for the sensors to detect us. Right, Beast?"
"Well," he began, shifting and hissing as the shock hit. "I must remember not to do that...I'm going to have a bald patch there now. I'm sure we've all noticed that we're not exactly bound in the traditional sense of the word but rather merely...restrained by inference. These sensors and arrays lay across us and are fastened in such a manner that it detects our movements and delivers appropriate shocks as required. If we were to try and move all at once, sit up, say, or even roll over, the resulting shock would be too much for the central nervous system to handle and death may occur."
"May?" Lance asked, his voice strangled with outrage. "May?"
Remy sighed loudly and, in an attempt to distract Lance from the burgeoning outburst, asked, "Paige, what was you sayin'?"
"Give me a sec..."
Jubilee turned her head to try and see what Paige was doing and could only stare in gape-mouthed amazement as Paige seemed to shift color, her form becoming less human and more dense, discolored and somehow less real than she should have been. Paige's skin peeled away as the change occurred, falling like dead leaves in a husk1around her. "Eeeeeew..."
Paige was now the form she had chosen, the one that would allow escape. Wincing in preparation for a shock, she moved, reaching tentatively for the sensors across her legs. Pulling quickly, as if removing a bandage, she flung the rope-likrip rip of metal and wiring away from her to land on the floor. There was a collective indrawn breath before she pronounced, "Done! Did it and nada...I'm not zapped!"
Lance snapped, "We'll throw you a party later! Get us loose!"
Paige made a rude noise and finished freeing herself before reaching for Jubilee. "Wait!" the Asian girl cried, "won't it zap me if you move it?"
"Good point," Paige sighed. "Beast?"
"Find the power source and disconnect it."
Paige husked herself back to her normal shape and, kicking the shell that had fallen away under the bed she had been on, she began searching the room high and low for some indication of the power source. "There's nothing!" she cried after several long moments. "Just wires going into the wall...no outlets or anything!"
Beast sighed. "I afraafraid of that."
Amara, sounding a little more scared than before, asked, "What does that mean?"
"It means," Magneto said, looking and sounding amused as he swept in through the sliding door that all evil geniuses seemed to have in their homes and offices, "that you're trapped. Miss Guthrie, I must confess that I had not taken into account your unusual abilities..." He snapped his fingers and a mist formed beside him. "Incubus, please see to her."
Paige's eyes went wide as the mist zipped towards her almost too fast to see. Incubus was in her in an instant, filling her with his presence. She felt violated and nauseated at once, as if she were being raped on a soul-deep level, the invasion of her body by unwelcome forces painful and disgusting. "No," she managed, albeit weakly, "lemme go!"
Magneto laughed with open amusement as Incubus forced her back to the bed, the metal restraints moving as if of their own accord with barely a flicker of the old man's eye. "Incubus will remain until I deem it unnecessary... Oh, and I have someone I'm sure some of you would like to see...Piotr!"
Piotr, known as Colossus, staggered in. He was massive and silver, metallic in form then. Magneto took no small joy in manipulating the Russian teenager, moving him to one of the beds and making him sit on the edge of a bed. He tried working his mouth to speak but Magneto would not let him. Beast snarled, sounding very like his namesake, "Let him go, Magneto. Whatever you want you can get from me! Let the children go!"
Magneto made a small motion with his fingers and Piotr laid down. "Let them go? Doctor McCoy, don't you know that pawns can be the most important pieces in a chess match?" He made a tsk-ing noise as the restraints clamped around Piotr, then continued, "I wasted quite a bit of my valuable time procuring this young man, trading a very precious resource for him. You see, he is my salvation, as much as it pains me to admit it, and you are all going to ensure I meet my savior and live to tell the tale."
Amara snapped before any one else could, "You're some sort of child molester, aren't you? You get off on this, don't you?"
Magneto growled, an unusual sound for the man but nonetheless threatening. "You need to learn some respect for your elders, girl!"
Amara cried out sharply at first, then a long, keening wail as the restraints around her tightened. Lance began thrashing against his, snarling at Magneto between his own cries of pain. "Let her go! Take me instead!"
"Take you where?" Magneto asked bemusedly. "Why are people always saying things like that? I'm not taking anyone anywhere. Yet." As if on cue, Mystique entered and, without making eye contact with anyone, she headed straight for Piotr and began pulling items out from the canvas bag carried in under her arm. A rubber tourniquet was applied and then she produced a needle and Vacu-tainer. "We need two pints to start," Magneto said tersely, turning on his heel to leave as Mystique attached the hollow needle to the tubing of an IV bag.
Pietro nearly plowed Magneto down as alarms began sounding and the lights switched from fluorescent to red and flashing, the teenager bursting into the room as his father was almost out of it. "Breech," he barked tersely. "Perimeter!"
"Speak slowly, boy!" Magneto snapped, drawing back a hand as if to strike him.
"We've got visitors," Pietro said. "Looks like some people from the Institute. Broke through the perimeter fence on the southern side...one of 'em blasted the hell out of the security mechanisms! And there seems to be a plane of some sort circling overhead...light jet, not military issue by far."
Amara exhaled slowly and promptly fainted as Magneto's crushing hold on the metal restraints faded. Lance had long since fallen unconscious but Jubilee and Remy were still coherent enough, along with Beast, to make excited yet cautious noises. Magneto inhaled sharply and exchanged looks with Mystique. "Finish," he ordered the blue woman. "Finish and meet me in the ops room. Pietro, it's time you got the chance to lead."

Kurt fought the urge to faint out of sheer exhaustion as he face the large Native American before him. "Um...hello!"
Warpath glared down his nose at the blue teenager. "I should kill you where you stand..."
Tabby, mustering her strength, managed to produce a few balls of plasma in her hand, held low at her side. "Kurt, feel like running?" she asked under her breath.
"Not really," he hissed. "But if I have to..."
"You have to!" She threw the plasma balls at Warpath's feet and they detonated almost immediately, throwing all three people to the floor. Tabby cried out in pain as she landed hard on her knees, then gasped as Kurt dragged her to her feet. They set off at a run, Warpath hot on their heels as they dashed back through the room that Tabby had been in and then down the only other exit, a white-walled corridor that seemed to be leading upwards. They had gained some distance on their pursuer when Tabby gasped again and pitched forward, sending them both to the ground, landing atop Kurt. "Oh, God," she moaned, rolling onto her back.
Kurt scrambled to his feet, putting himself between Tabby and the other male. Baring his teeth he growled, "Stop where you are!"
Warpath slowed to a walk but did not stop. "You think you can scare me, little boy blue? You're weak and she's weaker. We know all about your abilities, Kurt Wagner. All about them...your Professor is quite kind in keeping personal information on the same system where he keeps the information about the Institute's systems..." Warpath feinted to one side, making Kurt lurch brokenly, a bit dizzy from his lack of food and sleep. "Poor Kurt...what a way to go, isn't it? Kitty so far away, your sisters who knows where...Hmmm...just where did they go, anyway? Could they be somewhere in this house? Waiting for brother dear to rescue them? Or maybe they don't need rescuing anymore..."
Kurt snapped. Somewhere deep within him, a reservoir of rage burst and with a howl more inhuman than he had expected, he sprang forward. The sheer force behind the leap pushed Warpath back and onto the floor, Kurt's slight weight doing nothing to pin the larger mutant down but his rage doing a world of wonder in keeping him off guard. Kurt felt an animalistic satisfaction in wrapping his fingers around Warpath's neck, tightening them as much as he could then slamming the Native American's head against the white floor. "Where are my sisters you sick bastard? What did you do with them?"
"Nothing." At the sound of a female voice, all throttling stopped. Firestar seemed to be floating several feet off the floor and was radiating a blurry heat. "Your sisters are fine. Scared, but fine. They're not here but they are safe."
Warpath hissed and threw Kurt off easily and rolled to his feet. "Firestar, you've pushed the boundaries of Emma's largesse too far this time..."
Firestar held up a hand and a bright stream of flame shot out, making Warpath cry out and fall down again. With a tight voice, she said, "Keep going up this hallway. There will be a metal door at the end. I've unlocked it. Go through it and then down the second hall on the right. The door at the end of that one leads outside...the girls have made it out. I don't know where the others are, though..." After a pause, she said, "Run."
Kurt pulled Tabby to her feet and said, "But...why?"
Firestar directed a black s inw inward. "I am sick of it all...go now before Inge nge my mind."

1 Hence the name... And it can be argued that rubber is organic therefore she can change to it.