It was deafening. He shot a concerned glance her way. He hoped Kealey could handle it. The crowd was immense, and full of angry people. It was unlikely she could calm them all on her own. That was why he was there for backup and as a bodyguard. The crowd needed to relax... he didn't want them getting any closer to the mansion than they already were.

Currently, there was distance between the street they were on and the mansion. 5-6 blocks. That was good. The area around them was more upscale. Currently, the rioters were fighting with police, who'd been called to protect the school. But police could only do so much. 20-30 people was plenty.

An officer spoke into a microphone. "Ladies and gentlemen, please. Calm down. We need you to disperse." Someone threw an egg at his forehead. He ducked it at the last second, and shot the crowd an angry look.

Shin stood by Kealey's side, worried look on his face.

Boy...there were a lot of people...and boy were they angry.

Kealey had thought she'd be able to handle it. She walked down these streets every day, even at rush hour, and she could barely tell anymore. She'd practiced, and honed her skills; they were precise, they were impressive, and most of the time people didn't even know that she'd used her powers on them...

This...was on a total other level though. The whole crowd was so singular, so angry, so driven. Kealey caught Shin's worried glance and pursed her lips. Someone had to help. The Police were struggling to keep their heads above water here...working against a crowd that some would say was on their side. Everyone here hated mutants. Kealey met the eyes of a man in the crowd and frowned as he took in her uniform, she could feel the hatred.

The blond held his eyes and took all that hate away. The man's face lost its pinched look, just for a second, and Kealey smiled before turning to her husband. "I've got this." she said, reaching up to pull her ponytail tight.

"Just watch my back. I'm going to have to concentrate, and I'm not going to be able to do that if I'm getting hit with eggs."

That said, Kealey took a deep breath and let her carefully constructed walls down...just a little bit. A river of emotions rushed in, and she struggled to fight them...to push them and guide them where she wanted them.

This was going to be tough.

The entire City had an increased anger. The tension was high and that gave plenty of reasons to be angry. Plenty of reasons to murder. Plenty of victims already nervous of mutants and were all the sweeter to remove. The thrill of death wasn't the same as other human 'thrills' if they were worth the title. The rending of flesh was something he was used to. He didn't need a reason to do it.

The fact that he didn't need a reason was what brought him from Daniel's home to where he was now. Watching the humans make their puny demonstration. It was then his eyes focused on someone in particular. It was the Police Officer from the Alley. The one who denied him the rush that he would of felt from destroying that woman. A loud roar escaped his mouth as he ran and leaped off the small-ish building as he charged toward the Asian Police Officer. He had tunnel vision. No-one else mattered. The crowd. The Police. No-one. This man was going to die.

The Beast's muscles clenched and his teeth were bared as he made his way towards him. No obstacle could stop him. The charging monster noticed a woman that seemed to be with his current target, he was going to remember her. If nothing else she was a bargaining chip.

The roar shook him, snapped his attention away from his woman and the crowd, from defending her, to focus on something else. Something new, yet familiar. And inside his body, adrenaline started to flow.

His eyes locked onto the creature quickly, sighted it in his vision grid. People around him turned. Mainly police. Though a rioter or two turned from their focus on screaming to shout something else resembling 'Oh poop'.

6'1", built bulky, with red eyes and hams for fists. His whole body was spiky, and a purplish hue.

An officer nearby drew his firearm. This man matched the description given by someone of a known murderer... even if the attempt had failed. Shin drew his gun, too. The Asian wasn't one to pull any punches. He knew what this guy was like, and what he could do. That's why he also surreptitiously called up shards, forming a thin wire across the ground directly in the beast's path. A trip wire, several feet before he'd reach him. He aimed a shot aimed at the center of the beast's mass. No warnings. He'd already given a warning once before, last time they'd met. He didn't pull the trigger yet, though. Soon.

The Beast was charging towards the Asian officer murderous intent filling his eyes as he saw an officer draw a firearm, The Doctor put his foot out and slid to a stop as he also saw the one he was going to kill also draw his firearm. Beast was out-manned and out-gunned. He spun to face the Officer who'd drawn his firearm before the Asian had but soon realised and turned so both officers were on either side of him and the crowd of rioters stand infront of him. The Beast looked down and noticed he'd stopped mere inches before the trip-wire that could of sliced his legs off.


There was no way that the Beast could deal with all these police officers fairly. He stood and raised his arms and placed them behind his head, he got down on his knees and then laid down. Every breath he took in this position only filled his with more rage. Some police officers walked towards him and as soon as he heard the sound of hand-cuffs being drawn he removed his hands from his back, placed them on the ground and pushed up. The Beast got to his feet. More out-manned and out-gunned than before but strangely more comfortable with it now that the several officers around him were closer.

The Beast reached out and grabbed an officers head and twirled, smashing him into one of his colleagues. Two down. There were two more. Beast plunged his claws into the gut of another officer and tore them up towards his ribs, it was then the last police officer squeezed the trigger and Beast turned slightly using the body still attached to his claws as a shield as the Cop fired. The Shield-Cop may of survived the claws if he hadn't of been shot. Beast used his free hand to swipe the other officer. A crack being heard as he hit the ground. The purple skinned mutant turned to the Asian and the other Officer in the same position they were before. Them on either side but Beast now with a new body shield.

Something was going on...something big was going on, but Kealey couldn't stop what she was doing to pay attention to what was happening around her. There were so many emotions, and they were so strong that for the first time in ages she felt like they might carry her away.

Someone had told her a long time ago that other emotions were background noise, but that seemed like another life, and couldn't possibly apply here. The crowd was calming though. The blond X-Man had started at the edges and was working her way in. The plan had seemed to make sense...the people furthest away were the calmest to start, and as they calmed the rest of the crowd had followed suit.

The strain was enormous, and from the sweat beading and rolling down her face, Kealey knew that she couldn't let go yet. The balance sliders she always imagined when manipulating emotions were pushing back...hard.

Then it happened.

Bursts of fear that quickly flared to utter and complete panic, then exploded into nothingness. Kealey had felt that before, and they were like a sucker punch to the back of the head. She knew what they meant and she gasped, concentration and control shattering . The backlash literally knocked her flat, and Kealey suddenly found herself on her back, all the emotions on the New York street pressing in on her from all sides.

Where was she? Who was she? There were so many questions, and so many feelings to sort out. The blond knew she was in there somewhere...it was finding out where and answering all the other questions that was the problem. Somehow she knew that she needed to do it fast, so she got to work.

That trip wire? It hadn't been meant to do anything but trip. But as the mutant faked giving up, then got viscerally violent, Shin sort of wished he'd used buzz saws and a rain of blades instead. The worst part was Shin had half-expected the 'giving up' to be legitimate. Well, 1/3 expected. 1/4? 1/16? Point was, he was now madder than a cop who'd seen other cops get torn apart. His wife had seen it, and felt it. And that would leave scars. Painful, bitter, gross scars that wouldn't offer any sort of protection, or beneficial maps. She was already hurt. He couldn't let her get more hurt. This scumbag was going down. He... really didn't like the violence that was going through his head right now, but adrenaline is adrenaline, and caveman responses are what they are.

An anvil appeared over the monster's head. It didn't appear all at once. It took focus, time. During that time, multi-tasking was a thing. His mind snapped out to grab the trip wire he'd meant to trip the mutant with, bend it, add to it, make it fly around the man like a living rope. He had the brain for it, he had the control. As the rope moved, it grew, rounded itself off more, became blunted. That anvil there was to apply pressure... and he wasn't going to let the guy dodge it, or do something cruel. The cops on the ground were already dead. The one in his arm too, most likely. He needed to tie the monster in place, so as a distraction, he shot his gun. Not at the monster, mind you. At the ground by him, a good yard from his feet. The beast needed to answer for his crimes, and killing him wouldn't accomplish that. That was why the rope was round and hard, not thin and sharp, and why the anvil wasn't crashing down on him like a psychic sledgehammer. It didn't have the weight for something like that, anyways. At most, it'd just be a bludgeon from above. He really was more 'hack and slash' than he was 'crush the guy'. But Kealey didn't need to see that. Even if she got to feel the emotional whirlpool pulling down his heart.

His gun hadn't been aimed at the monster. Yeah. About that. Nobody'd told the cop by the Asian the plan. His bullet grazed the monster's shoulder. If he hadn't been worried about shooting a comrade during the Asian's distraction, he'd have shot more true.

The Beast snarled at the Cops as he noticed the blonde female collapse onto her back and out of distraction he dropped his body-shield but he couldn't pay too much attention now as by the time he could think, a bullet came towards him. His eyes watched as it hit the ground and another roar escaped his jaws but when he looked back up. The game had changed. He was trapped, pressure being applied from above and a rope wrapped around him. He couldn't move. He tried with all his strength. He thrashed and bit and snarled like a trapped rabid dog. A sharp pain brushed over his shoulder and he knew it. He was trapped. Out-manned. Out-gunned. He didn't give up however but no matter how hard he pushed, clawed or roared nothing was going to happen. "No! I will strip your flesh!"


As he stood. Still. Caged. Trapped. He had a strange feeling inside him. The deeply burrowed feeling that Daniel was cursed with. Helplessness. It was when Daniel could do nothing to save his pathetic patients but..worse. His life was at stake here. He would be trapped like this forever. Inside a tiny cell. Inside Daniel. Never being released. Never feeling life slip through his fingers. Never breathing again. Being trapped inside the head of a weakling for the rest of his life. For a moment, when faced with his own fate The Beast didn't snarl or bite or roar. He stood, blood pumping hard through his veins that were pushed to the surface by his muscle. The anger he felt never truly vanishing but just bubbling under the surface. That Mutant. He was...strong. Stronger than him. Not possible. Range. Only advantage. Could close the gap and kill.

From her back, the sky looked tranquil and fluffy white clouds lazily made their way across her field of vision. It was beautiful, and it was a life preserver to hold on to while Kealey tried to find herself in the sea of emotions. There was no more of the paralyzing terror, and the blond managed to swallow the bile that had risen in her throat as the other officers had been brutalized. It was a step in the right direction, clinging to physical responses that she knew were her own meant that she actually existed.

Kealey blinked and closed her left fist. None of the officers had been Shin. She couldn't see him from her vantage point, but she could feel him through the ring on her fourth finger. They weren't her emotions, but they were familiar...and they were livid.

Clawing through the other emotions was hard, nearly impossible, but over a matter of moments the emotions at the furthest of her range began to fade into the background. The center of the crowd followed, and as she crept towards the close edge things became manageable and the empath rolled, finding her hands and knees.

Able to focus again, Kealey realized that while the emotions from her husband were familiar, they were almost primal. The blond understood. She was feeling less than tranquil, and as she pushed to her feet, her eyes locked on the monster who had wrought all the chaos.

She was shaky, and wove for a moment as she started to approach her husband, the crowd in the background still slightly stunned from their own version of the emotional backlash that had seen Kealey on her back. It would give her time to help deal with the situation at hand.

The mutant that her husband was restraining was like nothing that Kealey had ever seen. He brought back memories of a grocery store and times long past. His muscles were straining, and he positively emanated rage. The blonde looked for his eyes and saw nothing there but the emotions she could feel...the rage was predominant, but there was something else that made the X-man's blood run cold.

Elation and pure unbridled joy...there was something else, something fleeting, but it was too weak to hold on to.

Kealey tasted metal in her mouth and realized that she'd bit her cheek. Taking a deep breath and not wanting to break Shin's concentration, she held the monster's eyes and went to work, pushing down that rage and joy, looking for a handhold on the glimmer of something else she'd felt.

The anvil was stupid, but he kept it pressing down. Kept the shard rope in place. Cautiously, police drew closer to the mutant. They kept their distance for the moment. Some pulled wounded or fallen comrades away, gave them their dignity.

There were too many options. They were all flooding Shin's head. He could reformat the anvil, and make a cage. Or he could turn the rope into razor wire, and give the guy a nice hula hoop. He could press down and keep pressing, or make the anvil jagged. Or he could keep it as it was, and make sure the guy's hands and feet were bound, so the police could put an anti-mutant restraint collar on the monster, to reduce his threat level. He chose the options that were most likely to allow him to keep his job. He did nothing, just maintained the hold on the monster he'd already been maintaining. With the rope wrapped around the beast's arms, he could struggle... and he was... and it was pushing at Shin's concentration... but he couldn't easily escape.

It was probably for the best he hadn't done anything fancy. Maintaining the binding was actually taking more concentration than he'd realized. If his concentration had slackened on the rope to do something nasty with other shards, the monster might have broken free.

The Beast stood and struggled in the bindings but nothing would happen. No movement. As if he was fighting against gravity. He looked around to see Cops converging around him and then he noticed someone else. The blonde woman. She was making eye-contact with him and he felt something strange. He felt as if he was calming. He didn't feel the anger within him anymore, he didn't want to smash or maim or kill. He didn't enjoy what he'd just done to those Cops and that only meant one thing. Daniel. Daniel was there. In the back of The Beast's mind just as he was in Daniel's. They were together whether they wanted to be or not. "No! Get out of my head. Please! I don't want to go back!

A Police Officer approached The Beast cautiously and placed the collar on him. The Beast was calm for the first time in his own body but not for much longer as his body began to disappear and Daniel's replaced it. It began slow. The skin changing colour and the spike sinking into his skin then he began to get smaller. His eyes no longer glowed and the Beast began to sink back into the recesses of Daniel's mind. "No!"

As his eyes came back into focus he could see Police Officers tending to their comrades and giving him strange looks, anger and pure hatred. Daniel knew nothing. He didn't know why he was here. Why there was dead Police officers scattered around him and why he was wearing a mutant collar. He just focused on a blonde woman who seemed to be intently looking at him. Daniel's green eyes met hers and he somehow knew what happened.

What Noel had run away from. What he hid inside him. The Voice inside his head. He had killed these people and probably countless others. He didn't speak he just looked down as tears welled up in his eyes and they rolled down his cheeks. He was confused. He looked up to the blonde woman and spoke. "What did I do?"

Kealey almost felt like she was punishing herself as she forcibly calmed the beast. What she hadn't expected was the part where he started to physically change. Every school child hears the tale of Jekyll and Hyde, but nobody ever really expects to see it in the middle of the street. What nobody really expects is to share Jekyll's emotions after the fact.

The police were angry, furious in fact, and they had reason to be. They were legitimately justified in their frustrations...but suddenly Kealey was worried for the man in the collar. He was still looking at her.

Slowly, she walked forward, completely heedless of the glances in her direction. Nobody tried to stop her, and she couldn't help but wonder if they would intervene if anything happened. When Kealey was close enough that she had to look up to maintain eye contact with the man who had wreaked so much havoc, she really took a look at what he was feeling.

It only took a few moments, and then the blonde's eyes widened.

"You really don't know?" she whispered.

"I'm going to keep you calm." she said, worried that if she didn't they'd relapse. "And we'll talk about it later."

That jerk. That jerk. That jerk, that jerk, that double bubble, toil and truffle shuffle, Grade. A, Jerk. How dare he? How dare he! Just when they'd caught him, filed him away and cataloged him away as 'vicious, horrible, psychopath mutant with no redeeming qualities, whatsoever' he'd decided to shrink down to human sized, and not know what he was doing. The police didn't believe it. Many didn't care. A lot of them realized it didn't change what he'd done, and even more of them determined that maybe it was an act.

How many people had they arrested, or heard of being arrested, who said they hadn't done it, or that the devil had made them do it. That it was the One-Armed man. The police who weren't carrying away the wounded or the dead sighed or narrowed their eyes. The few closest to the criminal stepped forward to talk to the curly-haired blond woman. One put a hand on her shoulder. "Ma'am. It'd be best if you moved back to a safe distance. This man is in our custody, and dangerous." He said gently. Shin was feeling a mix of all of the above. He shook his head to dismiss the anger, and settled on a quickly boiling fury, and worry.

He stepped forward, drawing the shards in the shard anvil away, into a shield that hung red on his right arm. People moved to draw plastic ties from their utility belts, and Shin waited to remove the rope. "Kealey," the Asian's voice was quiet, but firm. "You should do what he said. You can keep him calm, but... right now, you might get in their way."

Daniel was strangely calm. He couldn't tell why but he was calmer than he thought he should be. Perhaps that's what happens, when you hit rock-bottom and everything you've build up in your life crashes down upon you, you've only got one way to go and that's up. Perhaps it was the blonde who'd told him that she'd keep him calm. Either way it was kind of nice.

He heard the Police Officer tell the blonde to step away and the Asian repeat it shortly after. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry." He didn't know whether he was apologizing for killing four police officers or the idea that just rushed through his mind. He just wanted answers and he didn't want to go to jail to get them. He didn't kill people. He was Doctor Daniel Booker, he'd never hurt anyone in his entire life purposely but all the signs were there. The bodies. The Police. Everything. He couldn't go to jail. Not yet. He needed to escape.

The Doctor noticed the weight be lifted from above him and the surrounding Officers removing plastic bands from their belts and Daniel grew desperate. He needed to leave. He needed to leave now or he was going to Prison. No way would they accept that he knew nothing about it.

As if on cue more people began to pile into the Riot that before now was just the background and with re-enforcement, the already rioting people grew a new vigor behind them. They began to spark up again. Pushing, shoving and throwing. The Police needed to control it again.

Keeping a man calm when her irritation was quickly building was something that Kealey found difficult. She managed though, working on compartmentalizing even as she shot a quick, narrow-eyed glance in her husband's general direction.

"I know what I'm doing." she said, just to remind him that she wasn't here as an innocent bystander who had been pulled into the mayhem. She had the X-Man uniform on, she had the boots, she had the com. In fact, she was the one who had brought the situation to the point where it was now. It chaffed her that now that she had gained the upper hand for everyone she was expected to step aside and let the 'professionals' do their job.

"I've got it under control, and I want to talk to him before you do." Kealey knew what had a tendency to happen to "cop killers" and it was funny to her that they so often resisted arrest.

The crowd was getting wound up again, and Kealey could feel it. Time was short, but in all honesty she was afraid of what would happen if she released her hold on the man in front of her. Yes, the collar might hold him, but if what he said was true and he had absolutely no control over his power...then would the collar stop if he changed? The police wouldn't stop it, for fear of him being on the loose again...so the blond stayed where she was.

"We can help you." she said to the man. "I will stay with you while they take you in, keep you calm, and we can go from there." It was the best Kealey could do. The police would never let her take a criminal from their custody, even if the mayhem he'd caused hadn't exactly been his fault. The...injured police had families, and those families deserved the closure of knowing that the person who had hurt them wouldn't do it again.

"It might not seem like it, but I know how you feel."