Sentinels Central Park

Once upon a time, on an ordinary afternoon in Central Park, something extraordinary and a little frightening began to happen. People were having picnics. Joggers were jogging along the winding paths. And then, all at once, five enormous shapes rose up from the trees — giant robots, thirty feet tall, painted purple and gray, their sensors humming to life as they scanned the park around them.

These were called Sentinels, and they had been built by a scientist named Bolivar Trask, through a secret government program called Project Wideawake. They were meant, originally, only to track mutants — to find them, and identify them, and nothing more. But that morning, somewhere along the way, their orders had been quietly switched from tracking to capturing, and the great machines began marching south through Manhattan, scattering picnic blankets and startled joggers in every direction.

Word reached Westchester within minutes, and Professor Xavier's team wasted no time at all, gathering in the hangar and lifting off into the sky before the alert had even finished sounding.

Cyclops arrived first, firing careful, precise beams of light from his eyes to buy the others time. Storm rose into the sky right behind him, calling up a thick, rolling fog that spread across the park, blinding the Sentinels' sensors one by one. Wolverine climbed straight up the leg of the nearest machine, his claws screeching sharp against its reinforced metal plating. And Jean Grey stood a little apart from the others, focused completely, working with all her strength to scramble the robots' targeting systems from a distance, sweat beading at her temples with the effort.

And Rogue — Rogue flew straight for the lead Sentinel's chest, where a glowing panel pulsed steadily like some strange, giant, mechanical heart. She reached it in seconds and tore the casing open with her bare hands, marveling, even in the middle of battle, at just how strong those borrowed hands had become.

The Sentinel's massive arm swung toward her without warning, faster than she expected, and Rogue only barely dodged in time, feeling the rush of wind ruffle her hair as the great metal fist passed by. For just a heartbeat, she hesitated. Then she dove straight back in anyway, reaching past sparking wires and tangled circuits, and pulled the processor free with one firm, decisive tug.

The enormous machine groaned, shuddered, and folded slowly down onto its knees, its lights dimming one by one until it was still, hydraulics hissing softly as the last of its power drained away.

One down. Four enormous Sentinels still standing.

But now the whole team was working together, each part fitting neatly with the others — Storm's fog rolling thick across the grass, Cyclops's beams flashing precise and steady, Wolverine's claws finding every weak seam in the armor, Jean's focus never wavering for a single second, and Rogue's nerve carrying her from one giant machine to the next. One by one, like dominoes finally given the right push at exactly the right moment, the Sentinels fell.

By the time the sun began to set, painting the sky orange and pink above the skyline, all five lay still across the park's wide Great Lawn, and city workers arrived with trucks and cranes to begin the long, slow work of hauling them away. Rogue sat quietly on the shoulder of a fallen Sentinel, catching her breath at last, watching Cyclops gently help an elderly jogger back up onto her feet nearby, brushing grass from her sleeve with a kind word.

"Trask built these to make people afraid of us," Rogue said softly, mostly to herself, though Storm was close enough to hear it too. "Funny, isn't it? How today just proved the exact opposite."

Storm smiled, the kind of smile that said she understood completely, and reached down to pull Rogue up onto her feet. Around them, the park slowly returned to its ordinary evening rhythm — picnic blankets shaken out again, joggers finding their pace once more, dogs chasing after tossed balls as if nothing unusual had happened at all, the whole city settling gently back into place, safe for one more night because five friends had chosen, without a single doubt between them, to stand together.

Goodnight, Rogue. The park is quiet now, the stars coming out one by one above the trees, and so, at last, are you.