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Post by Hank McCoy on Oct 5, 2004 18:46:04 GMT -4
From the journal of Dr. Henry McCoy: - Late September
Good Intentions.
Not that it counts for much, but in my heart I know that in everything I've done I had nothing but good intentions. And as I sit here and reflect back along the path my mistakes have brought me I can only wonder now at why I never recalled until just this moment what the proverbial road to Hell is paved with.
Good Intentions. The very best.
It only means that my road to meet my own damnation will be taken in a stretch limousine.
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Post by Hank McCoy on Oct 6, 2004 10:20:57 GMT -4
I haven’t led the sort of life that would make me a person who tends to believe in things like dreams coming true.
Nightmares, on the other hand… I believe in nightmares.
I’ve seen them.
It’s only a matter of time now before my own nightmares come to destroy me. There isn’t much time left, and so I write this in hopes that someone, some day, may find it and understand.
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Post by Hank McCoy on Oct 6, 2004 12:14:41 GMT -4
The nightmares began when we returned home from the confrontation on the moon. Those of us who were there fought to stop the Phoenix from destroying everything. We thought we did…or at least, we thought we repaired the damage.
We were wrong.
And although the world we returned home to was alive and we had undoubtedly saved billions from nonexistence…<br> …we didn’t save everyone.
And the knowledge of those countless and uncountable lives…”unwritten”….by what we had been unable to do tormented me.
The faces of those now gone haunted my dreams.
I couldn’t face them.
And so, with everything I had I fought not to sleep. Another battle there was no way I was going to win.
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Post by Hank McCoy on Oct 6, 2004 14:23:33 GMT -4
The grandest irony to me in all of what has happened is that the one event, the one mistake, that led to all of this occurred not on the moon or after…but before.
And it was a relatively simple mistake.
I picked up the wrong bag.
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Post by Hank McCoy on Oct 6, 2004 15:08:29 GMT -4
Blame me for being disorganized or simply confused in the aftermath of the X-Men’s battle with the mutant-hunting robots called Sentinels.
Blame my enthusiasm or my anxiety and the short time we had to prepare for being called to join the queen of an empire galaxies away in saving the universe.
Blame the plain old McCoy bad luck.
Whichever reason, it doesn’t matter. In the rush of events, I meant to pick up my medical field kit and instead picked up the backpack that held the last of the decoys I created to fool the Sentinels’ mutant tracking sensors.
A mistake like that, had I discovered it in the field, could have cost lives.
The second greatest irony is that much later, it did anyway.
And the point of why I write this now is that I believe that it may have cost me my own.
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Post by Hank McCoy on Oct 6, 2004 17:04:10 GMT -4
But I’m getting ahead of myself. There are things I need to explain if people ever hope to understand. Let me start with the Sentinel decoy. Believe it or not, before the universe was “rewritten” the government set giant robots on us. On mutants. Robots that could detect mutants using phenomenally advanced sensors, not unlike the Professor’s Cerebro system. The robots were intended to hunt us down. And that’s what they did. So I came up with a defensive countermeasure. I built devices that would fool the robots’ tracking systems by projecting false signals someplace else. And central to the success of those decoys was that they contained small samples of mutant DNA. I used as many as I could get my hands on. Don’t believe me? Check it out…. xevolved.proboards35.com/index.cgi?board=library&action=display&thread=1079366183&start=5 xevolved.proboards35.com/index.cgi?board=library&action=display&thread=1079362265&start=52
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Post by Hank McCoy on Oct 6, 2004 17:30:08 GMT -4
And that was what I mistakenly took into space instead of the bandages and all my medical gear. It was the last time we would ever see the world as it was. Our world.
If I had only left it there it would have vanished along with the Sentinels it was made to defend against and the rest of that world.
Dear God…. Forgive me. I didn’t know what I was doing…<br>
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Post by Hank McCoy on Oct 6, 2004 18:25:46 GMT -4
As I said before I wasn’t sleeping. The nightmares kept me up at night. So I occupied my tired and tormented mind with other things. Anything.
And that’s when I discovered my mistake.
I was up very late unpacking all the things cast aside after our return and found the backpack. And the decoy inside it.
But it was the realization of what the decoy carried that left me dumbstruck.
DNA. Much as I could find, remember? I wanted to be able to confuse those Sentinels as much as possible.
Only the universe had changed. Intrigued, I cross-referenced the tiny cellular samples. Most of the mutants represented inside my decoys were known to be living and well.
Thirteen of them had not, as far as I could tell, ever been born. I sat alone until the sun began to light the morning sky with the samples laid before me on the dining table that overlooks the lake. I read their names affixed to each of the slides and I mourned those who had never been. Some of them, I remember only too well.
It horrified me somehow to have in my possession the last tiny remains of 13 people. I felt terribly sad. I felt responsible. More than all of that, though….I felt tired. The last of my energy finally left me, and despite my fear of nightmares….I fell asleep.
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Post by Hank McCoy on Oct 6, 2004 18:57:00 GMT -4
It began like all the others. In my guilt and disappointment, the faces of those I remembered called out to me and wept.
But this nightmare was also different. It was the first time I saw those terrible yellow eyes.
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Post by Hank McCoy on Oct 6, 2004 19:26:00 GMT -4
I can only guess what really happened, but my theory goes something like this:
He caught me at my lowest point. From that point forward, he haunted me….manipulated me…and it was only when he slept that I was ever truly alone.
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Post by Hank McCoy on Oct 7, 2004 7:48:12 GMT -4
He needed me. Would never have walked again without me.
Oh, lord… Jamie Madrox…
What have I done?
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Post by Hank McCoy on Oct 7, 2004 8:49:01 GMT -4
It must have been that the psionic energies that made up his mutant body were somehow immune to the changes brought about when the M’Kraan crystal cracked.
His reality warping powers having something to do with that, no doubt.
But I think that while his scattered energies had no place to go in the time before the crystal they converged on the last cellular remains of his body. The remains from within my decoy, the only evidence that Kevin MacTaggart ever existed.
He should have been too weak without a host to ever be a threat to anyone again. Whether by luck or by some design I’ll never know, I fell asleep next to the ghost of the parasitic creature once called Proteus.
As I collapsed against the dining room table he found enough strength to work his way into my exhausted head.
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Post by Hank McCoy on Oct 7, 2004 11:18:39 GMT -4
My dreams after that were infinitely worse.
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Post by Hank McCoy on Oct 7, 2004 11:29:21 GMT -4
Worse, too, were my waking hours. The being that now held telepathic influence over my subconscious mind blinding me to the truth. Luckily for me he wasn’t strong enough to actually possess me. If he had been, I would already be dead like poor Jamie.
He used my knowledge and my sadness and my fear.
He tried to use me to create a body.
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Post by Hank McCoy on Oct 7, 2004 12:14:49 GMT -4
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