themaker

It was a rare moment for Forge to be found in front of a computer, rather than hidden away behind the workbench. Crutches left forgotten on the floor beside him as he hunched over a peculiar customised keyboard, the monitor's backlight was his only source of illumination tonight. It was past midnight, and Forge couldn't sleep. Over the past few weeks he had grown accustomed to the strange chemical smell of the hospital, the soft buzz of machines that hovered at the edge of silence. Now that he was back home, the dull and painful ache pulsing from where his right leg ought to have been was causing him a great deal of discomfort, and there was no morphine drip to ease that pain.

If anyone were to see him now, they may have had cause to be concerned. The computer's glow illuminated his tired expression, deepening the shadows under his eyes and lengthening the frown lines in his mouth. He briefly passed a hand across his brow and sighed.

Though Forge much preferred the cold, hard impersonal machinery of the repaired workshop, he kept his personal computer in his own tiny space out the back, away from prying eyes and disconnected from the network. Unfortunately it hadn't fared well in the earthquake, the harddrive having been completely crushed by an overhead beam, and so he was faced with the delicate task of retrieving the data from it.

It wasn't really that much of a problem to be honest. Forge was, after all, a mechanically minded genius and so repairing a few crushed motherboards was child's play; a game he could do with his eyes closed. What had been particularly difficult were the nature of some of the files he'd come across, hidden far within the digital jungle of zeroes and ones, archived so deeply that he'd all but forgotten about them. Brow furrowed in concentration, Forge entered a few command prompts into the machine and as the screen before him flickered to black Forge caught his breath, the floodgates of his memory giving way as he suddenly remembered exactly what this file was.

( The footage began by passing quickly over black material, grainy at first until it could make out and grab onto shapes. It came into focus on a head of dark brunette hair, the automatic zoom panning out to capture its target. )

havenmods

Everyone might have been on guard for another potential quake - but this was so completely off the scales of what anyone imagined. At around 3pm on Friday afternoon, the ground buckled and rippled out from the epicenter, quickly extending far out beyond Santa Monica's borders, the entire state and the surrounding areas soon feeling the shake.

At Paradise Hotel, they were luckier than most. Thanks to the quick thinking of Jean Grey and Madeline Pryor, they were able to reinforce the hotel, keeping it from completely collapsing around everyone's ears. It wasn't perfect - the top of the building still swayed and buckled, the two top floors crashing down in on each other and partially damaging the third. Most of the windows shattered, with the balconies quickly collapsing in on themselves and the back stairs following suit.

In the upper levels, Julian Keller found himself caught underneath a piece of falling concrete, knocked out as it pinned him down. Mark Sheppard, having stepped out onto one of the balconies not long before the quake, was instead impaled by a broken railing, suspended almost in midair. Forge would later be found buried underneath a slab of concrete that had once been part of the back stairs. They weren't the only residents who needed immediate help, and everyone needed to get out of there in a hurry.

Paradise Hotel was trying to fall down.

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