A Rumble of Frost chapter 25

February 16th 2001, British Royal Museum, 10:00 AM EDT

Once  we finished eating, Jean made some calls to some of Uncle Chuck's  friends on this side of the pond and got us access to a cabin in the  woods. It wasn't exactly a novel hiding place, but it was a damn sight  better than trying to fight the boomer twins in the middle of the city.

Arriving  at the place, we all crashed (me on the floor because the damn beds  were too flimsy for my weight). It was three PM local time, but they  were more likely to attack at night anyway, so sleeping through most of  the morning wasn't a bad thing. Jean stayed up to play lookout, and once  we woke up she crashed for a few hours while the rest of us started  planning out how to go about this, though she didn't sleep for that  long.

"So...do  we prepare? They can blow stuff up, but they still have to move through  physical barriers." I asked flatly. I assumed there had to be some  limits to their explosions too. Even if they were immune, unless they  had bodies like mine they would need to worry about blowback, shrapnel,  things falling on them, and any number of other possible problems. Then  again, maybe not considering they blew up that warehouse easy enough  with Pete in it.

My  team's genius nodded from where he sat on the couch in the cabin living  room. I was standing, since all the chairs were old and wooden. Fucking  shitty ass english countryside furniture. "There might be ways to keep  them at bay, or at least funnel them. Barriers won't be effective most  likely, but empty space would stop them no matter how much power they  have."

I  blinked as I looked out the window. "Wait...you mean we make a moat  around this place? That's brilliant. If they only have a small path  inside then they won't be able to get close enough to blast us from  anywhere else, and blowing up their only route would be stupid. It would  seriously minimize their ability to use their powers."

Ororo  perked up. "I could help with that. Clearing ground. A water spout or  cyclone in a condensed form would be able to erode dirt pretty simply."  At everyone's confused gazes, she scowled. "Just because I was a thief  doesn't make me stupid. I'm extremely well versed in meteorology. I  could probably get a PhD in weather phenomena if I applied myself. You  have to have a good grasp on that kind of thing with powers like mine."

"I  could see that." Peter said thoughtfully. "Weather is extremely complex  and varied, even if it has some core principles. You'd need to  understand each individual aspect of the process to manipulate it to the  best of your ability."

She  shrugged. "It comes naturally to me, to be fair. Its like when someone  writes a murder mystery. They already know the killer, they can go back  and plug in the answers to reach the conclusion they want, instead of  the other way around. I can feel the way the energy moves to create  certain effects, all I have to do is plug in the stimuli that create  those effects."

"Alright."  I said firmly. "As cool as all this is, I think we should work and  talk. Who knows when the bastards will get here." I looked at Peter.  "What kind of depth are you thinking, and width. You've seen their  explosions, so you can give us dimensions right?"

He  grinned at me. "I've done copious research on fortifications, not only  can I come up with the space we need, I can design defenses using what  we have. Our first issue is space though. This cabin isn't in a clearing  exactly. We need empty ground to dig out."

Turning  to walk over to and out the door, I hopped down off the porch (the  steps had creaked suspiciously loudly when I'd entered) and landed with a  loud thump. Walking up to one of the trees, I bent my knees, locked my  arms around the trunk, and HAULED with every ounce of power in my body. I  lifted with my legs and not my back, because I've been working out a  long time and I'm not stupid.

There  was a beat of nothing happening, then I felt the ground below me shift  slightly, the tree groaned, and with a vicious wrench I ripped the thing  clear out of the ground, roots and all. Panting, I dropped the tree to  the ground with a crash and stumbled back, falling on my ass.

Peter  whistled as he walked over. "Damn. That was impressive. I mean sure,  that's a small tree, but still, the average tree requires about eight  point nine tons of force to uproot." He raised an eyebrow at me.  "You...know there were much more efficient ways to do that, right?"

I  climbed to my feet, brushing myself off. "You rush a miracle worker,  you get lousy miracles." I said loftily. "I needed a baseline to work  from. I can use my powers to tear them up, but if I overdid it too much I  might have caused a sinkhole or something."

That  got an impressed look. "Yeah, you might have. Might still, given how  pervasive root systems can be. We can deal with it though. Smashing the  ground down to compact the dirt and then tossing the excess earth from  the digging into the holes should more than stabilize the ground,  provided we do it as we go."

The  others came out, mostly Felicia, Ororo and Kitty. Once Jean had woken  up, Jean and Logan had slipped away, presumably to fuck or talk about  Scott or whatever they did when they weren't doing those first two  things. I had no clue what my new friend had in common with the  arthritic avenger, other than the fact that they apparently both loved  her bouncing on his dick.

Ororo  was looking impressed at the raw strength on display, and I puffed up  in pride. Then she flicked a hand and had one of the other trees sucked  up out of the ground by a fucking wind vortex, and we all had to take  cover as it crashed to earth. Peter glared at her. "What part of  'compact the dirt as we go or we might cause a sinkhole' wasn't clear to  you?" He turned to me in annoyance. "Billy, smash." He pointed at the  messed up dirt patch where my small tree had been.

I  raised an eyebrow at him. He flushed and looked guiltily at Kitty, and I  rolled my eyes internally as I walked over to the churned up earth and  knelt down. I then condensed a pair of fist sized hypocenters and  proceeded to smash the ground flat with raw kinetic force until there  was a small crater of compacted earth.

Peter  cleared his throat. "Ah...thanks. Sorry about the tone." He was a bit  nervous, probably because I'd been looking him in the eye as I smashed  my fists into the ground hard enough to demolish stone. "Can you...maybe  do the one she made next, as she continues pulling them up?" His voice  was hesitant, but there was an undertone of pleading. He really wanted  to show off for his new honey bunny.

Since  he'd asked nicely this time, I graciously agreed, and then went to  work. Ororo kept at her own job as I did mine. Tear up a tree, smash the  ground. The floor of the clearing became really uneven, but it was  better than unstable root tunnels under the whole thing that would  collapse as soon as we started to dig.

It  took about twenty minutes to finish, and as we dropped the trees, Peter  was stripping the branches and leaves off as best he could with his  bare hands, so by the time we finished, we had a neat little stacked  pile of logs, albeit logs with plenty of bark and notches on them.

"Alright."  Said Peter, clapping his hands. Now we need the holes at least deep  enough for the whole log to fit inside, though they won't be taking up  the whole thing. So...maybe fifteen feet? We can drive them into the  ground some too, anyway, Billy, can you do that thing you did before and  just...like rip out the earth?"

I  shook my head. "No, uprooting a massive slab like that isn't clean,  there's a lot of excess energy bleeding off, it turns anything around it  into shrapnel. The only reason I did it at the museum is that I didn't  care about collateral damage once the guards were out. Doing that on a  smaller scale would need WAY finer control than I can possibly manage. I  CAN break up the earth to make digging it way easier if that helps."

He  nodded thoughtfully. "Do it. Small area, near the house, then we can  have Ororo use that opening as a starting point to erode the dirt from."  He indicated a spot on the ground. "Try here, maybe a ten by ten square  around you. Can you keep it to that small an area?"

I  could, probably. It was hard to estimate the are that would be  affected, but I'd developed a feel for it, at least within my normal  limits. Obviously doing big over the top stuff like flipping that museum  building threw that out the window, but part of learning control on a  smaller scale was understanding the impact of my abilities.

Kneeling  down where he'd gestured I raised a fist. I didn't haul back or punch  too hard, I just help my hand up over the ground. A few inches up, I  condensed a hypocenter about the size of a baseball, adjusting my hand  to an open palm. Then I placed it gingerly on the ground and smacked it  lightly.

Rather  than crack like an egg, the space beneath it fractured, and there was a  tremor as the faults in the air spiderwebbed, expanding a few feet out,  but staying incredibly fine because of the low power. The ground  rumbled under me, and as I got up to nod to Ororo and step back, I  wasn't sure I'd actually done much.

She  formed a cone of wind, starting it out as a suction type effect,  pulling up dirt from the area. Sure enough, the dirt wasn't packed very  tight, and as she siphoned it off and blew it into the many craters  around the clearing a hole began to form.

The  hole went about five feet down before it became clear that the  disruption was way too localized. Jumping into the hole I tried again,  trying for a stronger pulse in a smaller area. The was a rumble, under  my feet, which kind of worried me, but after nothing went wrong I bent  my knees, condensed a pair of hypocenters under the balls of my feet and  pushed off, flying up and out of the hole.

There  was another shudder in the ground, but when nothing happened, Ororo got  back to work, slowly using her vacuum trick to dig further without  doing too much damage to the ground. Finally, after a while, she got to  the fifteen foot mark. It took about fifteen minutes to dig out, which  wasn't bad, and we all watched in fascination as she condensed the water  from the air into a water spout and used that to slowly erode the edges  of the hole.

Slow  and steady, making sure to keep the moisture in the funnel and not let  too much leak into the dirt, she expanded the hole on all sides until  she reached the marks that Peter had made on the ground. And so it went,  for hours, the moat...thing, would have collapsed, except Peter had me  install the logs along the edges to act as a support. I wasn't sure why  it didn't collapse around them, but I wasn't an architect, so I didn't  question it.

A  single log was split up with an axe from the cabin into smaller pieces  (guess who did that) and sharpened to make stakes he placed in specific  locations in the trench, and after literally hours of exhausting work,  we were done. A ring fifteen feet wide and deep around the cabin, with a  single three foot ridge between them creating a path for them to be  funneled through.

Finished  with that, we headed inside to wash up and eat what food was in the  cabin, because it was getting late and they would probably be here soon.  Once we had some soup and rested a bit, Jean and Logan joined us, the  hairy bastard grunting a hello while the redhead's cheeks turned the  color of her hair.

Just  to fuck with her I made a circle with my fingers an shoved my pointer  finger in and out while wiggling my eyebrows, and she turned somehow  even redder, to the point where I was worried she might have an  aneurysm. I tried to hard to avoid laughing that I choked on my soup,  and while I was coughing my spoon flew up and smacked me in the eye as I  let go of it.

Jean  gave me a sweet, innocent smile when I glared at her, and everyone ELSE  laughed, and I just went back to my food, grumbling about not getting  any respect. Sadly, I didn't get to finish, because Jean's head jerked  up in shock as she stared out the window. "They're here." She spat.  "Four of them are mutants. The twins have weirdly similar mental  profiles, and one of them doesn't seem to want to be here, but the last  guy...he's weird. I can't read him. I only know he's there from reading  the others. There are a few dozen regular humans too. Armed, they feel  like military."

We  all stood up, fanning out and sticking close to the walls so we  wouldn't be seen. "Rory. I want a wall of wind around this place.  Disguise the moat until they get too close. We might spear a few on the  pit trap spikes. Kitty, you take Felicia with you and get to cover in  the back of the house. If they start firing ghost the both of you."

Kitty  looked ready to argue, but Peter cut in. "He's right. I know you two  are useful in a fight, but you're also the most vulnerable. Especially  Felicia." I smirked at him, smart call to deflect blame from the crush,  stupid to deflect it to my kitten, she would make him pay for that  later. He missed the amused but determined expression from my busty  thief though, so he'd have to figure it out himself.

There  was a crash outside as someone came through the windwall and fell into  the pit. I hoped they got speared, but sadly they didn't. The absolute  beast of a man, even bigger than me, who climbed out of the hole, was  completely unharmed. The huge dome shaped helmet he was wearing made him  look like a literal wrecking ball. I sighed as he climbed up. Well,  that would be my dance partner. Stepping out the door I watched him  climb up onto the stable ground past the moat and headed to meet him.