NOTE:~ means telepathic communication. * means personal thought. [ ] means cyberpathy or computer-generated speech.

FROM LAST CHAPTER: The New Mutants went off to a beach party to celebrate Labor Day, but HYDRA ruined their plans by unleashing a certain giant lizard in Tokyo Bay. Meanwhile, the mystery of Jebediah Guthrie's disappearance is about to deepen...

Yukio's island began to split and rupture, lava floes driving the Mutants into the air. The telekinetics and Charles lifted the non-fliers to safety, including an irate Yukio.

"Do I EVER read the contract?! NOOOOOO! When wil I learn - the greatest con artist in Japan, and HYDRA - stinkin' HYDRA! - snookers me!!" she yelled.

"Is it him!?" Nate yelled to Frank.

Frank focused his clairvoyance into the heart of the largest eruption and slowly nodded. "'Yana - spellweave us our uniforms. We're gonna need them," Frank sighed.

Illyana complied, as the initial ash and smoke cloud began to thin out. The teens were stunned briefly at the size of the giant creature who stood amongst the cataclysm. Fins ran the length of his back, while atomic fire glistened in his eyes. Its' scales were grey-green, and a shriek escaped the 10-story-high tyrannosauroid's jaws.

Godzilla had returned.

"Mother of God," Gailyn said as she crossed herself. "What're we gonna do against THAT!? It's a force of nature!?"

Frank shook his head. "We've gotta try - there's no way to reach Sunfire or China Force, right, Yukio?"

"I left my cel-phone in the wave park - that's another claim I've got for my insurance," Yukio smirked.

"There might be a way to stop Godzilla without actually fighting him," Cathy said. The others turned to her as she outlined her plan.

"I only touched the surface of his mind before, but if I could get into his head and convince him to sleep..." she shrugged.

"Ahem... Cath, my possible future sister-in-law," Bill said, "this isn't exactly a garter snake you're talkin' about here. This is GODZILLA!! That's a LOT of willpower to overcome!"

"We have to try something," Cathy scowled. "And I'm the best-suited to try. Even if my powers may not be that big..."

Frank snapped his fingers. "'Big' powers! That's it! I boosted my folks' powers when the Technet came after me the second time, and that wasn't even on purpose! If I can hype Cathy's faunopathy, maybe she can knock lizard-lips out!"

"It's worth a shot," Yukio shrugged.

"We've gotta hurry - he's hungry," Cathy warned the others.

"Ray, you'll hafta link us - I'll have to concentrate on not feeding Cathy too much power," Frank said. Charles flew Rachel, Tom, Cathy, and Frank into a position just over the still-yawning Godzilla.

~Ok,~ Ray sent. ~Here goes - don't fight me if you can help it.~ Frank lowered his mindshield, while Cathy relaxed her natural fear of mental invasion as Emma had taught her in Psionics 101. Ray bridged the gap between the differentially-"wired" telepaths, and Cathy gasped in wonder as her awareness of the animal world jumped infinitely.

~Ok... here goes,~ she smiled. She pictured her power as a spear, much like Dani's own weaponry from home, and flung it into Godzilla's mind. He lacked psi-screens as human telepaths understood them, but the creature's will was vast and deep.

~What to do!?- of course!!~ Cathy thought. She projected:

To the Mutants' silent joy, Godzilla's eyelids began to droop. Cathy kept up the lullaby, and at last he sank beneath the waves. She broke contact and fainted into Tom's arms, saying, "So... much power...so deep a mind..."

Ray cut the link between herself, Frank and Cathy, while the other Mutants and Yukio met them in midair. "I really don't want to hang around..." Yukio said. "I suppose you guys don't have room for a combat instructor, do you?"

"Are you kidding!? That'd rock!" Nate grinned.

"Will she be ok?" Tom asked Frank worriedly.

"She's just tired," Ray reassured him, checking the sleeping Cathy.

"Illyana, we'd better go before the media gets here," Frank said.

"We're gone, big guy!" the Siberian grinned.

They teleported, but Frank suddenly yelled, "The trace radiation- Illyana, WAIT -" The teleport went wild as the Mutants vanished.

Emma was not amused. The latest addition to the Beta-Hellions, a mere slip of a girl from Ireland, had been caught using her powers without permission. Normally, Emma wouldn't have worried - but when one was dealing with a chronovariant, one had to be careful one wasn't risking altering the timeline. *Even if Reed Richards' writings state that is impossible, I'd rather not chance all the Hellfire Club has on one child's recklessness,* she thought. *Still, I shouldn't tear her apart. She's honestly repentant, and some experimentation certainly can't hurt.*

Emma turned to "Shiftress," or 11-year-old Rhiannon O'Ferguson, who was quaking in the center of the training center in her Hellions uniform. "Now, don't be scared, little one," the White Queen smiled. "I just want you to try to jump to the future and bring something back."

"I-I'll try, ma'am," Rhian swallowed. Her green eyes were brimming with tears, and her red hair was dancing wildly as her powers began to take effect. A flash of white light marked her departure.

Rhian had never really tried to go to the future. At most, she had only traveled five minutes into the past. She pushed herself down the strobe-lit timerace, windows of possible times to be flashing past. *Incred'ble,* she thought, awed rather than afraid. Rhian was so awestruck by the sights that she didn't see a window coming right at her until it was too late.

~NOOO!~ she mindcried. The "window" shattered, spilling her into a barn with a flare of energy. An older boy in overalls, with sandy hair, yelled, "What th' -!" Rhian screamed as she struck him, and her power went wild again. They vanished in an explosion of lightning.

Emma sighed and checked her watch. *She can time-travel, but she can't return in 5 minutes?*

Emma got her answer as Rhian and a stunned boy appeared in midair. "Haroun! Catch them!" Frost yelled.

Haroun ibn-Sallah Al-Rashid, Jetstream of the core Hellions, launched himelf into midair and caught the two. "Easy, little one," he smiled to Shiftress.

Haroun landed and set the stunned travelers before Frost. "Amazing!" Emma breathed. "Take the boy to the med-lab, while I help Rhian rest from her ordeal." *That boy is a mutant as well! And a powerful one from what I can sense,* she thought...

Rhian opened the door to Bevatron's hospital room slowly. Ever since she had pulled him back in time, she had felt responsible for causing his amnesia. He'd take the name "John Doe" as a joke at first, but his roommate Michael Davies -AKA Beef- had suggested Brian Smythe. "Brian" had decided it worked.

"Hey, kiddo!" Bri smiled.

Rhian tried to hide her concern at his broken leg and arm; the core Hellions' battle with the New Warriors had left Bevatron injured. "You gonna be OK?" she asked in a small voice.

"O'course," Brian smiled in a Southern drawl. He switched to the French accent he used to tease their mutual friend Marie-Ange, Tarot. "And how is ze petite time-dancer, eh?"

"I'll be ok," Rhian giggled. "You goin' to the big dance on Labor Day! Miss Frost says I can go too!"

"You b'lieve it, kiddo," Brian winked. "Word is the actual X-Men've been invited. Somethin' 'bout the attack on Mr. Shaw." The Hellions had been gossiping for weeks after the Aug. 7 explosion at the Black King's chalet in Switzerland. Despite Magneto's attempted coup of Shaw's title, Emma and Selene had eventually realized that Shaw's presence on the Inner Circle was preferable to the applicants they had been receiving. "Ah can't b'lieve Her Majesty wants t' bring in the X-Men. They're decent folk, but silly if they think we need 'em," Brian added. Rhian took his hand and prayed he was right. If a force existed which could send Sebastian Shaw to the grave, what hope did 95 mutant children have...?

Marie-Ange Colbert gasped in horror at her tarot spread in the Hellions' assigned suite. "Sacre mere - death! For all of us!!" she cried. The other core Hellions - Bevatron, Beef, Catseye, Jetstream, Roulette and the visiting Empath - and Shiftress spun about in rapt attention. Tarot's predictions were rarely wrong.

"Oh, Christ on a jumped-up signpost," Jennifer Stavros, Roulette, muttered. "I knew this was a bad idea, after that assassin was stopped in Miss Frost's office yesterday." Only the core Hellions had known about the attack - a mere boy, welded into a hyperadvanced battlesuit, had failed to slay Emma. She had had him torn from the device in a fit of pique which had scared the Hellions into silence. Shiftress, whom Emma had seriously begun to consider bringing into the core team, had been informed by Bevatron after he'd sworn her to secrecy. Rhian had needed no convincing after hearing the screams coming from Emma's office, where the boy had been "questioned" by Selene. (Emma rarely handed such messy details herself.)

"So what do we do?" Manuel De La Rocha sighed.

"We don't die, obviously," Haroun spat. "If we had stunt doubles... "

"That's brilliant, Haroun!" Marie-Ange smiled. She drew the Twins and asked Jennifer, "Strike this card with a good-luck disc, please? I have an idea."

Roulette complied as Tarot conjured the image. To the Hellions' surprise, eight figures - duplicates of themselves - appeared. "Incroyable!" Marie-Ange smiled.

"Now, where do we hide?" Empath asked.

Roulette ordered the duplicates to go attend the party, while Beef shrugged. "The basement?" he asked.

The Hellions' choice was made for them, as a huge circle of light and a yell of "ILLYANA!!!!" dragged them out of the room.

The Hellions immediately changed into battle gear, shocked to find themselves in a pastoral setting surrounded by New Mutants. "Oh... my...God," a blond boy breathed.

He looked straight at Bevatron, who looked back and shook his head in wonder. "...Luke?"

"Brian" asked. Luke grinned and yelled, "Jeb!?"

They hugged, as Empath yelled, "What is going on here?! Limbo's supposed to be full of demons, there were never this many New Mutants, and Bevatron's name is -"

"Jebediah Guthrie," Bevatron grinned. "Ah finally got mah memory back."

"Guthrie... but that means..." Charles gasped.

Luke mirrored his brother's grin and said, "That's right - he's mah brother."

"BROTHER!?" the Hellions and New Mutants yelled.

"Ohhhh-KAY," Illyana groaned, "I think we've just created a temporal paradox."

"Not at all," Tarot replied. She told the Mutants and a confused Yukio what had happened, while Illyana teleported the crowd to the biosphere.

Emma was sitting beneath an oak tree, thumbing through a pile of dossiers. *10 years ago today,* she thought mournfully. *94 innocent souls... Empath didn't really escape, either, considering he died barely three years later in that car crash. But we have to move - on -*

A huge number of familiar psi-signatures made Emma jump to her feet. "It can't be... YES!!!" She ran to the center of the biosphere, where a stepping disc deposited her students - past and present -before her with a Japanese woman in black leather.

"You're... alive...!?" Emma gasped.

"Miss Frost!!" Rhian nearly tackled her teacher, followed by the other Hellions. Tarot explained their return, while Emma thanked the New Mutants.

"You've... bless you," she smiled between tears.

"We do what we can," Nate smiled. "Oh yeah - can Yukio stay?"

Yukio smiled and waved to Emma, who swept her into a hug. "Good to see you, my old friend," Frost smiled. "You running from the Yakuza again?"

"Nah - the kids saved me from Godzilla, so I figured I'd crash with you and repay my debt," Yukio smiled.

"Is there anyone Yukio doesn't know?" Tom asked.

"She helped me open up the East Asia market when Frost International was starting to expand," Emma explained.

"That leaves only one question," Nate deadpanned.

"WHAT'RE WE GONNA DO WITH 21 NEW MUTANTS!?!"

NEXT: Nate's question answered, as we finally get to classwork!!