promisedland

All weekend she had been lying prone on her mattress, largely unmoving save for the odd twitch of her limbs or roll of her eyes while ghosts ran amok around the hotel, unaware and unable to do anything about it. As Monday stretched into the evening hours though her eyes opened; instead of dark brown they were shot through with a luminescent green, much the same colour as the spirits that had been extracting themselves from her body over the course of the last few days. Morgan sat up, only she wasn’t so much Morgan anymore as she was an entity, an amalgamation of the ectoplasm she had been absorbing for the last few months, one that had finally gained control of her body enough to move it.

Blank faced she swung her legs over the side of the bed and stood up. Out. They had to get outside. There wasn't one ghost, one entity inside of her, it was an amalgamation and they had one goal in mind. To get outside and away from the hotel, to cause destruction and chaos and to be free, that was all that mattered now. Morgan's body moved towards the door of her room on the fourth floor and grabbed for the handle, only the fingers of the body wouldn't curl around it properly. Gathering necroplasm in the palm of her hand she took the alternate route and blew the door clean off its hinges, sending it rocketing across the corridor and slamming into the opposite wall in a splintered mess. Morgan half lurched through the gap, muscles taut and shaking with tension, head set at an obtuse angle, cloudy green eyes snapping to the left. If anyone got in her way now, they were going to be eating dust and carpet.

promisedland

Over the last few months the fresh surge of ectoplasmic energy had been almost seeking Morgan out like a moth to a flame. It soaked into her at every turn and the more that her slight body was filled up with the worse those headaches got. It wasn’t something she could feel exactly, she had never lived in a city with such a concentration of ectoplasm as Santa Monica now boasted, it felt like tiredness and heavy limbs, the sort of things she was used to from excessive studying and so it slipped under the radar. Not now though. Now, while Morgan lay unconscious on her bed where she had been moved to from the kitchen floor that energy leaked out of her and formed those ethereal ghosts that usuallybent to her will in every way but were now free of her chastising commands and control. They twisted like smoke, ullulating hollowly as they came together.

They were translucent and wispy, their torsos tapering into fine smoky points. Their faces were twisted and distorted, the sort of horrifying expression of morbid fear frozen on their faces, each one different from the next but all of them sporting grotesque disfigurements of bone and skin, broken nails and lolling jawbones. Gliding away from the prone form in the bed they seeped through the walls and floor and ceiling, one after another after another to wreak havoc on the hotel... and the residents within it.

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.

[ OPEN ]

flyingfree

"How could you all be so incredibly stupid?"

Warren was furious. He and Tessa had gotten the call about the kids, and after a whole lot of 'what the fuck do we do now?', Warren had ended up contacting some small time actors he knew and paid them to pretend to be the parents picking up their kids. This would have been a whole lot fucking easier if Jean had been here. Fucking Jean. The four kids had been brought back to the hotel in a taxi, where Warren had yanked them all into his office, which is where they were now. It hadn't taken him long to start yelling either, with Tessa looking on disapprovingly.

"How often do we have to remind you - you don't use your powers in public! You ESPECIALLY don't use them in the middle of your school hallway in a brawl with the cheerleading squad! Did all of you suddenly lose your minds? Seriously, what the hell happened in there?!"

[ TERRY, JAMIE, MORGAN, HOPE, TESSA ]

breakingglass

Classes had just finished, and everyone was moving around the halls, some heading for their lunch break, some to their next class. For reasons unknown to anyone but themselves, Lorna Dane and Theresa Cassidy were in the middle of one of these halls, hurling abuse at each other. It might have started when Terry tried to trip Lorna as she went past, a little Christmas gift before the break. But that honestly didn't matter now, as Terry was busy hurling abuse about cheerleaders and Lorna throwing back quips about drunken Irish sluts. Morgan Vigneaux, Hope Abbott and Jamie Madrox were desperately trying to get Terry to shut the hell up and get out of there, while Jared Corbo eyed off the football players at Lorna's back, wondering how many of them he could take at once.


Terry finally completely lost it when Lorna impugned her mother, shrieking at the top of her lungs and shattering every window in the hallway. They were all showered with glass, tiny cuts appearing all over most of them as everyone stood there in stunned silence for a moment. It doesn't last long, with Lorna being the first to stir and yelling about how Terry was some sort of freak. With every word, the metal lockers around them started to shake, door handles jittering as her powers slowly spiralled out of control. The screaming from others started at that point, Hope and Jamie trying to drag Terry away while Jared and Morgan engaged in a battle of insults with Lorna's friends. Lorna finally snapped, the lockers starting to detach from the walls and hover, crashing into each other and the people who were trying to put their books away.

( If you asked anyone what happened next, you'd get a different story. )