"I don't know. I wasn't zere. I sought... I sought she wanted to leave for a while to get the people who made the mess at her apartment, but pregnant ladies don't take risks like zat. Zis Ghost doesn't take risks like zat."

Jude locked the back door and pulled the little spotted lace curtains closed across the small window. He continued talking a million French tinted words a minute as he walked toward the front door. The glass panel was gone, replaced by boards and bent nails. Most everyone else was out getting supplies to fix this place up. Would they be sorry that Jude and Kat hadn't finished cleaning up before ditching? Probably.

"They lost track of Sebastian. Not for long, I'm sure, but he just... changed his daily patterns." Yeah. After his son grew up and shoved him out the door. "And ze Clinic was hit maybe ze same day? Maybe just close..." It seemed like they might go to the Clinic first. "I don't know what ze Xmen are doing." Probably looking, right? "Shin and Keaely are boths Xmen. Zey have to know what happened since zey live next door."

He got out his phone to start texting Eros. And, maybe Svetty.

Aedus was grinning ear to ear as he placed his bike on the rack and opted to just go for more deodorant instead of taking a shower. He realized it was a waste if he was just going to get sweaty and filthy again. so he threw on some jeans, switched out his tennis shoes for a pair of rarely used work boats and plucked a random shirt out of the closet. Orange.

He locked up his apartment and turned back around, he Caught a cab magnificently fast and was heading the six blocks down again when he got a text.

Aedus: Family emergency, had to run. Call you later. -Kat and Jude

" Whoa, stop here! Hang on a moment for me Alex." Aedus said to the cabbie, who he already paid in case he caught another fair.

Aedus opened the door and waved to Jude and Katrina who had just exited the building through a back or side door.. "How can I help? and will we need a cab to get there?"

Katrina's heart caught in her throat. It was just too terrible to believe that her friend Ghost could be gone, and the gentle man she had spent so much time watching was gone with her. Where could they possibly have gone to? How did someone just disappear like that? Also, maybe Sebastian wasn't gone? What was Jude talking about that they lost track of him? Wouldn't he be with Ghost, hwerever that was?

All they had right now was questions.

“Shin and Kealey still live at Iris, right? Maybe we should go talk to them first to see what they know. Thy could also tell us what the X-men know. Then maybe we can talk to the poli...” Katrina trailed off when she heard Aedus' voice as he ran to catch up to them.

They could use a cab, she supposed, except she was a little broke right now. She had change for a bus ride or two, but that was about it.

“Eh, I'm a little broke. I was thinking bus.”

Katrina put her hands behind her back and rocked back onto her heels.

“So, if you're going to help out, I suppose we should explain what's going on. Jude's adoptive parents are missing after their apartment got trashed. We're going to try and find them.”

They walked around the corner of the building, and there stood Aedus' taxi waiting for them, if they wanted it.

Jude had thought it might be close enough to walk... it probably wasn't. He just wasn't thinking straight. He just wanted to be doing something active and riding in a cab wasn't active. But it was faster. "Get in. It's not too far so ze fair won't be bad between us."

Kat explained about his... parents. It was just too weird to think of them in that capacity. They were his Ghost and his Sebastian. And yes, he still claimed Sebastian even if he didn't want him hanging around Future Sight. It was just better if he stayed away while they figured out the trigger for the apocalypse.

And wouldn't Aedus be surprised when his parents turned out to be about the same age as he looked right now? Jude tapped his foot the entire trip to the Iris Clinic.

"Would it really help to go to ze police?" If he sounded impatient, it was because he was. Weren't the police already involved? What else could they do? "Zey don't know I'm grown up. I'm probably a missing person too." Yeah, actually the police could be a bad idea if they presented Jude as the adopted son. This was sort of complex...

And it seemed like forever, but eventually they pulled up in front of the brick building labeled "Iris Clinic."

Aedus lead the way, and tried to make sense of it all, was this unicorn taking out the group’s family, that was low unicorn, and if he went after his family, well hopefully they were all there, they could come together and do some pretty effective stuff; if they worked together, any one of them would be in trouble if caught alone.

Aedus kept his mouth shut and nodded, it was easier to just pay later than argue, and if it got them to the emergency faster than it was money well spent.

Aedus listened to the conversation and was just dumb founded… they don’t know I’m grown up even mean? And he was a missing person… “ Look no offense to the police, but it doesn’t look like they did much for the store and if this has something to do with the people that messed up future sight, then it sounds like it might get serious and sometimes police get in the way of handling things quickly. Or It could just be a matter of miscommunication. Maybe they’ve already turned up. If we can’t track them down, that it is a good time to go to the police.”

Aedus handed Alex the Cabbie ten dollars more than the fair and stepped onto the sidewalk next to Iris Clinic waiting for his new friends to lead the way.

Jude definitely had a point about going to the police. They would definitely be suspicious of a guy that wasn't the age he was supposed to be. Especially if he claimed that he was the adopted son, and he'd just had a fight with Sebastian and had moved out. He was right, best to just avoid the situation.

The power copier tapped his foot the whole way. Katrina completely understood. She had a hard time keeping herself from nervously drumming her fingers on her knees. She caught herself twice, then crossed her arms and stuck her hands in her arm pits. She was almost afraid of what they would find. If they went to the apartment, and it was trashed, it meant that it was real. Ghost really was missing, along with her husband, and the baby.

“Thank you,” Katrina whispered to Aedus after he paid their cab fare. She'd make it up to him some time.

The front door the the clinic was closed, locked, and still decorated with official closed-for-business papers from whatever official bureau it was that decided that people unlicensed in medicine couldn't heal people for a living. The lights inside were dark, and the windows were getting dirty.

The little group went through the alley to get to the back door, where the residents entered. It led to a little room in the back where they could collect mail and go up the stairs. There was quite a lot of mail in the Csendes box, a lot of official looking mail. The top one was even stamped “Final notice.”

“Jude?” Katrina pointed out the mail. That was not a good sign.

The building looked... sad. Or maybe Jude was projecting. The red and yellow colored papers plastered to the front door certainly didn't look sad. They looked angry. Jude touched one that was blue, hoping it might be something less angry. Nope. Subpoena Ad Testificandum. It looked official and it looked complicated. Somebody really wanted to talk to someone from the Csendes family.

Kat suggested going around back and so they did. As a small apartment building, it was just courtesy to leave the public shared door open. Everyone had their own front doors to lock and at night, Jude remembered Ghost locking the main door before she went to bed... who did that now, he wondered?

> “Jude?”

With his sunglasses off, he could easily read the envelopes from across the room on his way to the stairs. PAST DUE. BILL ENCLOSED. Angry letters. Red again. Were those bills his responsibility now? He would have to take them with him and look it over to see what he could do.

Going up the skinny wooden stairs was a strange experience. Jude kept over stepping and kicking the stair backs. His feet were bigger and his legs longer. The scene at the top was no better for having his higher vantage point.

His eyes went to the threshold he'd walked through a hundred thousand times. The door was shut. Yellow police tape made a pathetic attempt to bar their way. Jude didn't even think about fingerprints or destruction of evidence. He just went to open the door. Which was locked. He didn't have a key.

The power copier looked to his two companions for ideas.

The cab fee was nothing important, money came and went, it was of insignificance, particularly when emergencies were at hand, family emergencies even more so. “anytime.” The light reply came to answer Katrina’s. He followed the pair letting them take the lead as the red and yellows told a story, it wasn’t only future sight having a rough time. He wondered momentarily if this was aimed at Jude. Did he have powerful enemies? If so he would just have to be a stronger friend.

Aedus felt like a bit like an intruder, they had just met and he was tagging along with Jude and Katrina, during one of the more rough patches in his life, at least he hopped this was as rough as it got for him. Aedus did his best to blend into the back ground as he tagged along.

One of his brother’s was a x-gene propelled accounting wiz, he could have him look at their finances if there was a way to turn this around, he could probably just give them some sound stock tips and put them on their way to propelling them to be in the black again, but that could wait.

Aedus reached up top of the door frame and ran his fingers along the surface and didn’t come a cross anything.

“I’m guessing we don’t want to just kick it in, we could try the fire escape. Or, were there any neighbors they would have trusted with a key?”

Two out the three people present had already used the fire escape as an entrance to the Csendes apartments. Not that either of them knew that the other had. It was just a matter of standing on the dumpster to reach the ladder to climb up, and with such an old building the window locks didn't all work as well as they should. It was just that Katrina had never done it before when she wasn't invisible. She didn't necessarily want to get caught for breaking and entering. Especially not onto a crime scene.

If she wanted to save Ghost, she had to, though. She could be tied up in the sewers right now by some evil, green eyed terrorist, or in a prison cell being interrogated by corrupt government officials, or held hostage by a crime lord who wanted...

Or they could ask the neighbors. None other than Kealey and Shin, members of the X-men. They were cool. She hadn't ever seen Ghost or Sebastian give them a key, but that didn't mean they didn't have one from before she started her surveillance.

They knocked. Then knocked again. No one answered, so maybe they weren't home right now. They could try again later.

For now, “It looks like the fire escape might be our best bet. Jude, if you go, I'll keep you hidden from sight so no one gets suspicious. Then you can let us in?”

He waited for as long as he could hold out, but nobody came to the door. He could call them later. He might need to if the bills kept stacking up.

Jude nodded to Katrina. He didn't have the confidence to steal her power and keep himself hidden. Plus... well, he'd somehow ended up with Aedus' non-existent power. He didn't have the brain power to figure out how to switch off of it.

The frenchman nodded once and started back down the stairs without a thought about leaving Aedus, a practical stranger destined to pass out sunflowers, alone with Katrina. He had a date with a dumpster.

He just had to trust that Kat had him invisible because. Seriously. Climbing a dumpster was not an elegant or pretty affair. The ladder was grimy from rain and city residue, but this was his task. If anyone should break into Ghost's house it was him.

Metal stairs jangled loose in their moorings, the windows at the top were dark and dusty. Still he knocked. He couldn't help but hope.

Jude waited even less patiently than at Shin and Kealey's door. He jiggled the window in the family room that was usually left open for the stupid cat. The thing should have been left open anyway. Even if she left, she would have left it open. Ghost was trusting like that.

It resisted at first but eventually scraped up in it frame. Jude scraped his fingers against the screen until it too slipped up enough for him to get inside.

It was dark and lifeless. He left here on purpose so part of him railed at thinking of it as home... still. He had serious nostalgia. Svetlana's room. His room. He stopped in front of the room with more police tape. Sebastian and Ghost.

He should let Katrina in. Part of him wanted to snoop around alone, but Katrina would want to know. Aedus might as well have been a puppy that wandered in off the street. In a way, he kind of was.

Eventually he made it to the front door and unlatched the locks. He had enough thinking left to hold the tape up so his companions would duck under it and leave the apartment seemingly untouched. They could poke around all they wanted... there was only one door Jude was interested in.

He followed the pair around the building for the most part being quiet, It was sad seeing this place, You could tell it had at one time been a busy place, and from what his eyes caught it had been one that was much more concerned with the patients than the money they might pay.

He looked to Katrina. “That’s a useful talent.” She was kind of awesome. Pretty, talented, she had her heart in the right place when it came to priorities, not everyone would be up for saving the world. Aedus watched Jude go down the hall and felt bad for his peer; He couldn’t begin to guess what it was like to be adopted and then loosing track of what family you did have. “I feel like I’m intruding but at the same time, there are obviously some rough people interfering with your lives, I want to be here with you guys if they show up. ” He wanted to know more; he would be able to help more if he was better informed.

Aedus was close enough to hear something moving around in the apartment, he tensed listening for a scuffle, if was making the noise in there was going to spring a trap on Jude, He was going to knock the door off its hinges…then again Jude was invisible he wouldn’t be the one getting surprised at the very least.

After his fears were proved false he entered in the apartment, normally he would have let Katrina go in first but he was feeling more and more protective.if he was a cat the hair on his back would have stood on end, He couldn't help but feel like something was up. Aedus put his hands in his pockets and looked around silently for clues. He would shadow Katrina around the apartment and keep an ear on Jude.

The look on Jude's face when he opened the door was sombre. It was only a preview of the dismal state of the apartment.

Katrina's face fell. Any hope she'd had that they could find some clue to help them faded as the door swung open. The place was completely trashed. Lumber that she had watched Sebastian and Ghost buy for a crib was scattered all over. Pillows were... 'exploded' seemed to be the most accurate word; it didn't even look like they had been cut, but had gone through a blender. Even the antique sewing machine was splintered apart.

That seemed so unlike the Sebastian that she had been following around for a month. He was always so careful, so reverent even that he went the long way around to avoid stepping on freshly planted flowers at the park. She had seen him sewing for hours on end, so why would he do something like that? The illusionist bent to look at the pile of rubbish where the Singer had once been.

Holes in the wall? She ran her fingers over the divots. Bullet holes? The idea of the unicorn man holding a gun... it was impossible to imagine.

“Something doesn't add up,” she whispered to Aedus, as if afraid that anything louder would anger whatever unlucky spirits still lingered here. “Sebastian and Ghost weren't... exciting enough to ever have a fight that included shredded pillows and bullets in the walls. I've never even heard them yell and I don't even think they owned a gun.”

Her next stop was the bathroom. There was more yellow tape in the way, so it seemed like there must have been something of interest. Sure enough, the mirror was all smashed to bloody spiderwebs and drops of blood were spattered in the sink. There was a hand print on the door frame, too, in a matching dark reddish brown. Sebastian sized, perhaps.

Katrina shuddered.

“What happened here?”

"Ghost had a gun." He spoke the words normally and it was like thunder in the enclosed space, but somehow made it less spooky for him. "At least, she knew how to use one." In the future she did, anyway. She'd kept her military weapon in pieces despite regulation. Safety and all that. If she had one in the here and now, he'd never seen it.

Katrina was right. They just didn't lead exciting enough lives for this.

Jude felt like the bedroom was a well of gravity that he couldn't escape. This was surreal. The room was in pieces a lot like the rest of the apartment. Everything was just... gone. This whole time he imagined it going on like normal. Ghost cooking. Sebastian, probably studying at the table until Ghost asked him to set it. They might watch a movie and do the dishes.

He imagined how it went down. Just a normal night like any other night.

"Svetlana wasn't here. I wasn't here. Zey probably went to bed early." The sink was full of blood and broken glass. He looked at the remaining pieces of glass and tried not to imagine what had slammed against it to make that circular shape.

"I don't sink we're going to get anysing here." Nothing but speculation. There weren't any major road signs that screamed out obvious answers for him. Nothing he wanted to see anyway.

"Police sink he killed her." He stopped to admire the brownish smudge that Katrina was inspecting. His brain wouldn't make sense of the shape. Why was it so interesting? It was just dirty. "Ghost wouldn't have wanted her things so dirty." It was easy to talk about her in the past tense. Jude grabbed a hand towel and wet it down in order to clean off the smudge.

It was disturbing to here the odd calm in Jude’s voice, hadn’t he grown up with these people? Did they treat him poorly? His eyes landed on a tipped over picture of Sebastian, ghost and Jude, he picked up the frame and straitened it by the very corner, he left it slightly askew as to not draw attention in case a crime scene team was going to come back in here.

“So unless something big changed with them, this is a set up?” if the future sight was a wreck, then this place was a disaster. The addition of blood added a whole new disturbing level to the scene. “I can’t help but think that future sight and this place are related. It is too close of a coincidence otherwise. “He glanced back and forth from Katrina and Jude. Were they telling him everything? Did he even have a right to ask for more? They had just let him tag along to a messed up crime scene, so he was in it whether he liked it or not.

Looking at this mess, he realized how much those crime scene shows sucked, Sure you could tell where someone might have shot a gun from and he was sure ballistics could give you an idea of how tell someone might be or what angle they chot from… but aas far as telling how a struggle went down, that was pure b.s.

“do you think the police are right?” he would trust Jude on this, he didn’t have an opinion on anything, he had nothing to base it off of, except that Katrina thought it didn't add up and Jude was in a state that seemed to not believe what was around him, at least it wasn't effecting him..

If that was blood, Jude was destroying evidence by cleaning it. Except... the police had already been and gone, taking all the evidence they needed. It wouldn't matter now if he wanted to put one thing in the apartment back the way it was supposed to be.

>>"Police sink he killed her."

“What do you think?”

Katrina didn't believe it. Even after being here, seeing all the evidence, she still didn't believe Sebastian was capable of it. Not the Sebastian she had followed around for so long. Not the Sebastian she had known in the dreams of the future. People changed, but not that much.

“It is too much of a coincidence to not be connected. So whomever did this, also did that, right? I just don't understand why someone would smash both, unless they were trying to kidnap you too, Jude, except no one was there so maybe the got frustrated.” Did that mean Jude was in danger? And who would have a motive to do something like that? Why would anyone want to hurt Ghost or Jude or Sebastian?

This detective work was sending her thoughts running in circles and it was making her grumpy. They weren't going to see anything else here, so they might as well just go. To where, she wasn't sure, but suddenly she didn't want to be at the forlorn apartment any more. She headed for the door, holding it open so the boys could follow.