Anacrusis

Posted on Sat May 29th, 2021 @ 12:15pm by Patrick Manco & Erik Magnus Lehnsherr

2,505 words; about a 13 minute read

Mission: Episode 0: X Lang Syne
Location: El Dorado Casino | Reno, NV
Timeline: 1986

Robberies were not easy. The successful ones were few and far between, and never accomplished by rolling in through the front door. No, they required a team with insider help, weeks if not months of prep and recon, redundant contingencies, and no shortage of luck.

Patrick had no such thing at his back. No help. No prior planning. No contingencies. All he had was a big imagination, the will to power, and a need for cash to finance it. The 16 year-old teenager with years in the foster system had reached peak adolescence, which meant he was ready to strike out on his own. Emancipation. Independence. The Big Life. All of it needed money.

Well, casinos had money. Lots of it. And while they had security systems, there was no puzzle Patrick couldn't solve given enough time. Casinos were loud labyrinths designed to get people lost in the shuffle long enough to lose their life savings. Their physical security laid at the perimeters, relying on electronic measures to silently monitor everything in between.

Robbing this one one would be child's play.

The El Dorado wasn't the biggest casino in town, but it would do. Walking in through the wide glass doors, Patrick took a few steps before removing his sunglasses. A wave of his hand disrupted the CC-TV network. He paused for just a moment to get the lay of the land.

Two uniformed guards on either side of the door. Two more in the security office at the left corner where the ground floor cash carts were kept. Too much attention, even if they were distracted by the technical difficulties. Patrick vacated the lobby as fast as he could.

"Hold up," said one of the guards who'd spotted him. "How old are you?"

Patrick closed his eyes and got ready to run. In an instant, the nearby slot machines began shooting out coins all over the floor. All of the retirees and middle-aged patrons on their day off started shouting and grasping at the small fortune that began piling up on the floor.

Suddenly the hindering security guard had bigger fish to fry, leaving Patrick to hop up and over the slots into the next row. He walked a few more feet, ducked down an intersection, and paused long enough to set off more slots.

Everyone's attention fell to the inexplicable malfunctions. Patrick kept moving at a brisk pace, stopping only to nullify any camera whose line of sight he could intrinsically feel. The card tables were too exposed, so he skirted them toward the bar. Pesky bartenders would spot him if he didn't distract them. His mind reached out for opportunities for mayhem. The spritzers began to malfunction, spraying the bartenders with foamy liquid from their taps.

Patrick walked past it all unobstructed.

When he got to the rear corner with the door's marked STAFF ONLY, he waved his hand at the keycard reader, which resulted in the deadbolt sliding open. Patrick smirked as the door slid open as well. As he walked through into the restricted area, he paused long enough to feel the architecture. The vault was three floors down. Numerous locked doors with checkpoints and guards led down to it. But then there was a secure elevator. Patrick activated it.

Doors opened, allowing open access to the secure vault elevator. Patrick entered and let it ferry him down to the subbasement where the vault laid. When the doors parted, it revealed palettes of shrink-wrapped cash bags.

"Jackpot!"

Patrick strolled up to the first pallet, winking off the cameras with the blink of an eye. With a pocket knife in the other hand, he cut away the plastic wrap and helped himself to as many cash bags as he could. Each one was marked with 100 grand. And they were surprisingly light. He grabbed five of them and slung their straps over his shoulder. All together they weren't much more than 20 pounds.

There wasn't much more he could carry out on his person, so Patrick took his leave. Returning back to the secure elevator, he rode it to the basement level. There was no way he could walk out the way he'd come. But fortunately the fire exit signs were more than helpful. Distracted as the staff were, and helpless as the security team was without their surveillance system, Patrick couldn't help but pick up his pace as he approached the emergency exit. This had been too easy.

Signs on the door warned that the fire alarm would sound if opened. Patrick waved his free hand along the door frame, visualizing the door sensor, willing its location to appear in his mind. Once located, he disrupted it.

The alarm went off.

"Damn it!"

Patrick kicked open the door with its crash bar and hurried out into the alley. Tall stonework walls with fancy overlay towered overhead, giving him only two directions. One went toward the street, the other toward the rear parking lot. The street would have far too many witnesses. He went to the rear parking lot and clutched the straps of his haul for dear life. This money was his ticket out of poverty. All he needed was a way out.

It took precious moments to get to the rear parking lot, but once he was there, he had his pick of vehicles. Employee vehicles would be no good. Those would be the first ones police would look for. A plumber, though? His van would work just fine. And he was evidently still inside.

Walking up to it, Patrick popped the lock on the back door and rolled the ignition in one wave of his hand. The van's engine roared to life as he stowed the cash bags into the cargo compartment. Just as he closed the doors, though, a commanding voice sounded off from behind.

"Hold it right there!"

Patrick jumped at the unexpected command. There had been nobody around. He had been quite sure of that. The authoritative tone could only be police. Slowly Patrick raised his hands in the air.

"That's it, hands up! Turn around, slowly!"

Turning as instructed, Patrick raised his hands in an arc and joined them over his head.

"You're making a mistake, officer." Patrick smiled at him.

"Yeah, that's what they all say," the officer retorted as he called in his arrest. "Got one in the rear parking lot."

But the officer's radio squawked back at him with pure garbled static.

"Edward Three-Ten Dispatch, 10-78, larceny in progress at El Dorado casino," he said more formally into his radio. "Suspect contact in rear parking lot."

After more unintelligible squawking, the radio went dead.

"All right, son, looks like you're coming with me." The officer reached toward his hip and removed his steel handcuffs. "I'm going to toss these to you, and you're going to put them on."

The handcuffs landed at his feet, but Patrick made no move to retrieve them.

"Put them on, son."

Patrick grinned at the officer. "No." Putting his hands down, he even made to leave.

"Don't you move!" The officer said. "Get down on the ground now!"

Ignoring him completely, Patrick walked around the van toward the driver's seat without a care in the world.

"I will shoot you if you do not comply!"

"You can try," Patrick said, putting his sunglasses back on his face without looking back.

So the cop fired. But after he pulled the trigger, his service revolver went off, yet nothing happened. Patrick flinched involuntarily at the pop behind him that should have been a louder bang, but was nonetheless unharmed.

"What the hell?!" the officer shouted. He fired again, but this time there was an adverse effect, as the chamber of his service revolver exploded in his hands.

"Gotta watch those squib loads, officer." Patrick chuckled as he climbed into the driver's seat. "They're always a doozy!"

Patrick left the wounded officer where he knelt, mangled hands trembling below his bloodied face, and put the van into reverse. Despite that unexpected development, Patrick figured he was now on easy street. Even though the police were patrolling and were clearly on alert, there was no way they --

Two SWAT trucks screeched to a halt in front of the van just before it could exit the parking lot.

"Shit!"

Patrick jammed the van back into reverse and tried to back up, but a third SWAT had hopped the curb and parked right behind him, blocking his path.

"GET OUT OF THE VEHICLE!" commanded a voice through a megaphone.

Men in tactical gear and assault weapons piled out of the vehicles and surrounded the van on all sides. Patrick had pulled a fast one on the lone cop back there, but he didn't know if he could squib the bullets of 20 gunmen all at once. He slammed his hands against the steering wheel.

"DAMMIT!!!"

This had gone all wrong.

They all fired at once. This wasn't standard procedure by a long shot. They were SWAT, sure, but at their core, they were still the police. And regardless of what the papers said, lethal force was a last resort. And if it helped salve any of their consciences, many of them didn't remember pulling the trigger.

Because they had not.

The bark of the firing pins going off in the chamber was muffled as the bullet's within the rifles was held fast. All that heat, all that pressure of gases trying to expel a brass cork down a rifled barrel, was not good. Designed for momentary overpressure, the SWAT team vanished behind puffs of exploding cordite and shattered casings. Ballistic vests and face shields did their work, but a good many of the Reno SWAT team would need help opening their ketchup bottles from now on.

The back of the van opened, and a well-dressed man with a cane stepped up into the cargo bay. He then turned, the canes handle draped over his arm, and offered a hand to a woman who stepped up to join him. That done he turned and looked upon Patrick with a discerning look, as though reappraising something.

"I take it back my dear," he said in barely accented English. "He might very well be all that you claim."

After the momentary shock of being fired on from all sides faded into a sordid, sullen realization of being alive -- reminders of which came out in moans of agony from the SWAT officers splayed out on the ground wondering what in the hell had just happened -- Patrick quickly began to assess the situation.

Two strangers. Now in his stolen van. A score of fallen dead or dying SWAT officers suffering from concussive wounds of exploded weapons. The answer could only be one thing.

"You're like me," Patrick said, eyes narrowing in measuring disbelief at his own words, but the conclusion was indisputable. "But... more powerful."

The man with the cane smiled. He was middle-aged, silver beginning to lighten his temples. But there was something in his eyes, a core of unbendable iron around which his will was set like armour.

"Not at all young man," he said. "It is the will of the masses to make us quantify each other by who is more powerful. It is a tool of the oppressor. And I am not that. I have some small skill in your area of talent, but yours is a skill set that the coming age will be laid bare too. They'll probably call it technokensis or some such, again a label to quantify what the old world would have called the powers of a God."

He smiled warmly, and the roof of the van groaned. A metal strut in the ceiling was suddenly rent, bending to form a hook from which he hung his cane.

"My associate and I would very much like to sponsor your ascension to the new pantheon. A new...Brotherhood, if you will," he said, mulling the word over. "A brotherhood that you will find most accommodating to your way of thinking."

Patrick squinted in thought. "Brotherhood..." he said. "...of powered people. Brotherhood of Mutants." The realization had hit him so hard that he inwardly shamed himself for not thinking of it sooner. "That would make you... Magneto." If not for the demonstration, Patrick would have been skeptical. But everything made too much sense. When you've eliminated the impossible, then what remained, no matter how improbable, must be true. "I thought you were an urban legend. A group of mutants resisting the government only to be ambushed and arrested sounds like the sort of propaganda 'they' would tell us in order to keep us down, to keep us from living as we want."

"Perhaps I should wear spandex and walk around with a cape," Magneto chuckled. To his side his associate, an unassuming woman with auburn hair and large round glasses cleared her throat demurely, tapping a forefinger on the attache case she held. He turned to her and nodded. "Alas the very reason I have eluded the authorities for so long in their dogged pursuit of a villain, is by acting instead of reacting."

She opened the case, pulled out a sheath of papers, and held it out to Patrick. Passport, drivers ID, social security card and other forms of official documentation all bearing his picture but not his real name.

"A useful cover, I hope it serves you well. Your future would be somewhat dulled by incarceration, and as I said I have plans to sponsor your elevation from the rank and file." The van's suspensions creaked. "Ah, we've arrived. Delphi, the door?'"

The woman, Delphi, opened the vans rear loading hatch and...they weren't in the alleyway behind the casino. Nor were they surrounded by dead or wounded SWAT officers. Instead, the skyline of Reno's meagre excuse for highrise development could be seen. They were on top of the casino, the van 'parked' precariously with its rear wheels on the roof of the casino, with the rest of it standing out right into the open air. A helicopter sat on the casino's landing pad, a deep dried blood red gloss colour to its fuselage. 'Genosha Initative' was painted on the door, the words divided by a stylised DNA strand.

Magneto unhooked his cane from the roof rung he'd made, a raised eyebrow seemingly enough to twist the metal back into shape.

"You can choose to stay in the van, or you can come with me and help make right a previous injustice before it has time to harm any more of our kind," he said, taking one step off the van's tail fender and looking back at Patrick. "Or you can stay here. But I assure you, the ride will be much smoother and more comfortable in the helicopter."

Patrick grinned. "Deal me in."

"Excellent choice," Eric said, gesturing him forward. "Leave the money. We have no use for the script of the oppressor."

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