The man in the trenchcoat approached the underground train station.  He checked.  It was wheelchair-accessible.  Satisfied that all the details fit, the man bought a ticket and waited for the train to arrive.

After it had pulled out of the station, with most of the passengers heading for the exit sign, the man with the sandy hair, the lived-in trench coat and the dark sunglasses crept further along the station.  Moving towards the fast-departing lights, the man moved into the dark recesses of the tunnel.

He followed the tracks until they diverged, then moved off into a service tunnel.

Scott Summers stopped at a juncture near some pipes.  He opened the briefcase he kept with him since he’d arrived in the City That Never Slept.  He opened it now.  The briefcase was custom-fitted for three particular items:  it had two round slots that were empty, and a third that held a crimson-colored ruby quartz visor.  Cyclops took off his shades, revealing two glinting silver devices which functioned as his eyes, among other things.  He removed his eyes and put them in the case.  Now for the moment blind, he felt in the case until he retrieved his visor.  Once they were in place, he dared open his eyelids.  The power of his miraculous destructive vision safely contained, Cyclops closed the briefcase and turned to move back into the bowels underground rail system.  He thought about it a moment, turned back around, and placed the briefcase where it had been a moment before, among the pipes.

He would either come back for it, or it wouldn’t matter.  Either way, he didn’t need to carry it with him now.

The service tunnel opened out into a huge train yard.  The activity that was going on had very little to do with servicing trains.

Cyclops saw a figure on one of the hills that could have been natural or could have been constructed from heaps of trash.  The figure was not trying to hide his interest in Scott Summers.  The man quickly lost interest in Scott and turned his attention elsewhere.  He climbed to the top of the hill, then went over.

Scott quickly followed him.  This was either his enemy before him, or someone that might raise an alarm.  Either way, he had to pursue the figure.

He found them right over the crest of the hill.  The man didn’t look to be much of a threat.  He didn’t look to be much of anything.

“This is all a lie,” the raggedy man said to Scott Summers as he came in sight .  The derelict looked out at the construction site and said, “I’ve seen buildings come up overnight.  This is for show.  Window dressing.  I ain’t having it.”

Still, the parts of the building had come from somewhere.  Every major construction project begins with an architect.  Cyclops felt as though he were in the Architect’s workshop.

Two men followed him; ahead of him lay a monster.  Scott Summers walked deeper into the darkness, unperturbed.

The bowels of the city were as unusual as the metropolis above.  The seeds of the city that would grow to be Somnopolis were sown in an area that the modern era would recognize to be wetlands.  That was why the few operating metro stations were mostly above ground and used for short runs.  Many of the older tunnels were flooded.  Much of the early train system had been lost to disuse, forgotten about.  By some, not all, of its citizens.  Moondragon had known what lay down there.  Following her map, Scott felt confident that he would find his goal.  There were sections of the tunnels where Scott waded across.  There were other tunnels where foul, discolored liquid gathered in slow-roiling pools.  Overhead, as he crouched and scampered along in single-minded pursuit, there were all manner of steam pipes that dripped with noxious substances, offal pipes which carried their odorous cargo, communications wires that were stamped, bundled and tied for neat retrieval, buzzing with electricity.

Gradually the character of the abandoned railway system began to change.  Scott took note of how uneven ground and disused tracks was slowly replaced by polished steel and even surfaces.

It was a few seconds later that Scott saw his first monitor, set into what looked to be an ancient support beam.  A damp Scott Summers approached the old wood structure and examined its surface.  He didn’t need the cybernetic eyes  the Angel had given him to tell it was fake.  New materials disguised as old.

The tunnel he was in began to incline and widen out.  A few minutes later, Scott was faced with a quandary as he was literally faced with a fork in the road.  The tunnel branched off in two directions. 

Hearing activity from the right branch of the railway tunnel, Scott headed off in that direction.  The tunnel continued to widen out and one sharp turn later, Scott Summers found himself outdoors.  He was by the riverside.  …

He emerged into the turned up earth and sleeping machinery of a construction site after hours.

Somewhere close to the river.  He could smell the water, hear it splashing as it made its progress towards the ocean.  Although bereft of the sophisticated sensors of his cybernetic eyes, Scott didn’t need them to know he was not alone.  There was somewhere on top of one of the mountains of gravel that were all around the site.  Scott could hear the person’s movements, could hear it was a man by the sound of the man’s muttered curses as he momentarily lost his footing.

Although it was dark and he couldn’t see the man very well, Scott could tell he was spotted as he walked towards the man on the mound.  There was something of a difference to the quality of the air.   Whereas before it had been at ease, now there was tension, alertness, apprehension.  Scott climbed up the hill and stood, a couple of meters away from the other man, and stared out at the river.

When the first man was relaxed enough to let it sink in that Scott’s intentions were not outwardly nefarious, he ventured a comment.  “This construction site is a sham,” the man said, matter-of-factly; like stating the weather.  “I seen buildings appear overnight.”  He added. 

“Anyone ever notice?”  Scott asked, still looking out over the slow-moving river.

“Not so’s you’d notice,” the man replied.  “It’s almost like people expect it.”  Scott could hear the bunching up and letting go of fabric.  He figured the man had shrugged his shoulders.  “Who can blame ‘em?” the man wondered aloud.  “We’re all part of this three-dimensional dreamscape.  The man moved away from Scott, away from the slow moving river, perhaps back to the tunnels.  Scott had heard that people lived under the ground in New York City, why not here as well?

“Farewell, friend,” the man said as he started his way down the hill of gravel.  “I hope you find your answers.  Likely this isn’t it.  It ain’t too late to take the other fork in the road,” he added.  Whatever drama or mystery the moment might have had was spoiled as the man lost his footing yet again, slipped and slid a short way down the mound.

The man let out an angry curse and suddenly, a streetlight that had lain dormant on the site flared into life, as if to highlight the vagrant’s embarrassment.  With more muttered curses the man half-walked, half-slid his way to the bottom of the manmade hill.  Instead of heading into the tunnels, he made his way down the main stretch of the site, rounded a corner and was gone.  It said something about Scott’s preconceptions that he assumed the man to be a vagrant just because he was dirty.  He could just as well have been a construction worker or foreman working late.

It was Scott’s turn to shrug.  He let his eyes get used to seeing with their own power, unaided by machines.  The night lights of the City that Never Slept were glowing in the darkness.  The strange, jagged landscape of this strange, jagged city with its mysterious nocturnal growth spurts.  Viewed from a distance, Somnopolis almost looked like a machine.  A strange, jagged, unfinished machine.  Built to what end?  Scott wondered.

A few minutes later, he walked back into the tunnel system and let the darkness envelope him.  When he reached the division in the road, Scott Summers took the opposite branch.  The character of the tunnel changed fairly rapidly.  Even the character of the air was different.  Less humid, less damp.  Climate controlled.  Scott looked around.  It was easy to see why.  There was circuitry and machinery all over the place.  There were tv cameras and monitors all over the place.  Soon, there were even overhead lights.  Unlike the other service tunnel, the monitors were all active now.  Scott Summers figured he was not going to catch whoever was waiting for him unawares.  So he just squared his shoulders and kept walking straight on, resolutely.

 

Soon, he came to a station.  Scott got up from the tracks to the subway platform and took a look around.  The station was clean, well-tended, but empty.  Overhead in the main part of the station, Scott heard voices and activity.  He deliberately headed up the stairs.

The scene at the top of the stairs was like a vision of hell.  In a space the size of an airplane hangar, a man drifted suspended among the red blazing fire of several foundries going at once.  His arms were flung outwards.  Floating behind him were several IV drip bags.  The man was hanging without aid of wires or visible suspension of any kind.  He wore a loose fitting robe and Scott saw, there was a tube that ran underneath the robe to a bag on the side.  He was wearing a Foley tube to remove waste and an IV bag to keep nourished.  His out-flung arms and turning head supervised the dozen or so projects that were the ongoing concern in the huge space.  Scott took it in at a glance.  He thought about the construction site and knew:  this was where the real construction of Somnopolis was occurring.  And there, hanging before him was the man that Moondragon had helped him locate:  the architect of the Sleeping City, and the malefactor who had caused the catastrophic loss of life in New York City… and the death of Scott Summers’ wife.

Scott Summers had kept the rage bottled up inside him.  For years he had kept it locked away, wouldn’t let himself feel it.  He allowed himself to feel it now.  He set the rage free.  It came out in a shout as he rushed into the center of the hangar-sized bay.

“Mr. X, your experiments end tonight!!”

All activity in the bay ceased.

From the noise and bustle it had been, it became silent as the grave as the attention of the man running it all was broken.  The hanging man turned weary, sleep-deprived eyes on Scott.  “Professor,” he corrected.

All the activity in the bay resumed.

“What?”

He didn’t come all this way and lose so much just to be ignored.  He directed a blast of crimson hate at the murderer of New York.  The beam of brilliant light that issued from his visor sizzled as it burned its way to the levitating Mr X.

The streaming plasma rays stopped in their tracks by Mr X without even looking.  In a moment the energy of the rays were stored and directed towards one of the foundries. 

In the bay, nothing is lost and everything is under my command, said a voice in Scott Summers’ head.

“The hell it is!  I’m not!”

Oh… but you can be.

Scott Summers felt as if invisible hands had taken over the controls of his body and they were operating him with some sort of psychic joystick.  It lasted only a moment or two, then his body resumed being under his command.

I remember you now, the voiceless voice intoned.  You were her husband, Jean Grey, the Phoenix.

“Marvel Girl,” Scott answered, defiantly.

Yes…

I did not kill your wife, Scott.  Not intentionally…

She knew what she was doing…

The thought voice was all confused.  Scott smiled grimly.  “Those three phrases are contradictory.  Did you kill her or not?  Did she know that what she was doing was going to do was going to cost her life, or did she ally herself with you blindly?”

“I should say, ‘trustingly’ instead of blindly, since that was her nature.”

“…It’s not as easy all that.”  Mr X spoke for the first time using his physical voice.  What emerged was more of a croak than a normal voice, because of the length of time since his voice had gone into disuse.

“It never is,” Scott responded.

Hearing the contempt in Scott’s voice, and knowing the anger that he didn’t need psychic powers to feel coming from him, X gave up attempting to sound or act human.  He no longer kept his back to Scott Summers, however.

X had several assistants conducting the affairs of the rapid construction.  Scott saw that two of them, a woman with green hair and a brunette with a white stripe running down the side of he lush mane, took over leadership flawlessly.

About Seven years ago, Moondragon alerted me to the object she spotted in her planetarium. 

Scott remembered Moondragon showing him something similar when he visited her planetarium.  She had been trying to tell him something, but he had been too stupid to realize it.

She asked me to look into it, which I did.  Together we discovered its hostile intent. 

Four years ago we started working on a plan.  When the alien showed up we had rigged New York City to be a sort of conductor for psychic energies.  The bad news was that a flaw in the machinery caused the explosion that took so much life in lower Manhattan, including your wife.

The good news was that we destroyed the alien invader.

Or so we thought.

Turned out what we thought was the creature sent to destroy us, turned out to only be the alien’s envoy.  His advance scout.

Somnopolis was always set up to be a kind of backup, or fallback position.  After New York we’ve been working night and day to get Somnopolis up to speed. 

“To do what?”  Scott asked.

To become the next ‘powering up” station, X answered.

“Like New York,” Scott Summers challenged.

A painful look crossed X’s visage.  Hopefully not exactly like what happened in New York City.  But in the same vain.  Only this time we’re not using psychic energies as the focus.  It will be anger.

Have you ever noticed how, in Somnopolis, streetlights are everywhere?  Even in construction sites after hours?

Scott had indeed noticed that.

Have you ever noticed how they glow more brightly when someone gets angry?  They’re absorbing that anger.  Soon all that energy will flow out to the population.  Those whose psychic makeup allows them to, will act like batteries, absorbing the energy and becoming our force to fight the cosmic menace.

“I was just wondering,” Scott began, approaching the architect of Somnopolis.  “How many people agreed to help you?  Did you ask?  How many people, besides Jean presumably, agreed to the experiment you subjected them to in New York??”

There was no answer forthcoming from the man known only as X.  How could there be?

“Your talk is all idealism,” Scott said, walking to the center of the large area.  “But your actions are pure criminal,” he concluded.  

Scott turned away from Mr. X.  “Either you get turned in to the authorities tonight,”  Scott adjusted his visor and let out a stream of blazing light.  “Or I tear this place down around your ears.  Which will it be?”  The beam arced towards the ceiling, where a huge industrial concrete mixer was set free from its moorings. It came crashing down with a terrible clatter and a shower of red-orange sparks.  The whipsawing chain struck the green-haired lady, knocking her unconscious.  The foundry she was supervising began to upturn, spraying molten metal everywhere.

X reached out with his mind and prevented the green-haired woman from falling to the floor.  He used his powers to set her down gently.  At the same time, the bald man set the foundry upright and lifted the concrete mixer back into place.

Scott attempted to lift his visor, but he was prevented from doing so.  Some unseen force stilled his hand.

X was coming nearer.

“I think I’ve had enough of your displays of wrath, Mr. Summers.  More than enough, in fact.”

Scott felt an invisible hand around his throat.

“Underneath all your talk of defense and sacrifice, X, you’re just another zealot.  Perhaps a mad one, at that.  Who’s to say that there even is some kind of celestial boogey man coming to gobble us up in the night?...Maybe the only person …we have to… fear is …you…”

Scott felt himself begun to be lifted off the ground by the same force that had him in its death grip.  As he began to pass out, two thoughts, unbidden, came to him, seemingly at random.  X marks the spot.  Phoenix.

Using the last of his strength, Scott removed his visor.  He knew X would be able to block the beams as he had done earlier, especially this close a distance.  Their faces were feet apart, with the bald madman getting closer by the second.  Scott didn’t care.  He wanted to look Mr.  X in the eyes.  He framed a final thought , his eyes blazing with anger.  Beams held in check by his enemy’s awesome psychic abilities.  At least I am killed by you, and not your assassins.

Now that he had the upper hand, Mr. X once again communicated verbally instead of psychically.  “Assassins?  I’ve never sent assassins after – “

The explosive sound of shots rang out in the hangar.

X’s attention was diverted for just a fraction of a second, but that’s all it took.

Scott fell to the floor, the stench of burning flesh in his nostrils.  He closed his eyes and sought blindly for his visor.

He heard the sound of a shriek as the last of X’s helpers went after the would-be assassins.  Had the shots been meant for Scott or fr X?  Scott found the visor, and put it on.  He saw that X was not dead.  Bloody, staggering, and with half his face missing, X, with unhuman focus and design, sought out Scott.  “It begins tonight… You must…”

And finally the inevitable began to occur, the fearsome wound took its toll and X fell.

Moondragon! Cried a voice in Scott’s mind.  It was the final psychic cry of a strangely disappointing madman.  Scott had expected to find an evil genius, some psychopathic madman, someone whom it would have been easier to hate, but this man… and this almost accidental murder… was strangely anticlimactic.  Scott wondered if all vengeance left such an ashy taste in one’s mouth.

Scott looked around.  The hangar-sized workshop looked like it was an industrial waste site.  Mr. X was dead, one of his two lady helpers was lying on the ground, injured.  The other was covered in blood and looked to be in shock.  She simply sat numbly at the side of X’s body.

Right by the stairwell from which Scott had emerged there now lay two egregiously injured corpses.  Scott looked at the dead men.  He recognized one of them.  It was the body of the street corner preacher he had seen when he first came to town.  A man with blue back skin, cloven hooves and a tail, dressed wearing a cleric’s collar.  The other body looked to be of a semi-simian shaped man with huge hands and feet but wearing these little tiny specs and with neatly coiffed hair.  Scott imagined that these were the man responsible for saving his life.  It cost them theirs, along with X.

The man in the trench coat and the ruby sunglasses went back in the tunnel and retrieved his eyes.  Snapping them into place, he re-emerged into the recent battle scene.  He walked out of the building.  He knew he there would be an exit.  He knew someone would be waiting for him.

When Scott came out onto the street, there was a white limousine parked at the curb, waiting for him. 

Scott fished around in his jacket pocket, then his shirt.  Top left hand pocket.  Bingo.  Pay dirt.  Scott felt the package.  Still dry.  He took out a cigarette, lit it with his eyes.

“We still don’t like litterbugs here in the Sleepless City,” said Warren Worthington.

Scott threw the empty cigarette packet on the ground.  “I’m sure you’ll learn to live with it.”

EPILOGUE

FROM THE JOURNAL OF SCOTT SUMMERS

Three days after his death, we understood what the dying X had meant.  The alien invader called itself Galctus.  Near as I can tell, he was some sort of cosmic mosquito.  With Moondragon’s help, and a couple of others, we succeeded in finding the operating center for the great machine that was Somnopolis.  All the angry energy along with most of the dreams of the residents of the City That Never Slept was ready to be poured out into the populace, searching the proper receptors, folks who would use that power to help combat Galactus.

We learned how to use the great psychic machine.  We were READY to use it, but first we had to tell the residents of the Sleepless City what was going on.  We told people we didn’t know who or how many would be affected.  To their credit, not many ran.

So we used  X’s citywide device.  Again there was a problem.  Instead of finding a number of people to be stored in, the energy found itself filtered and stored in ONE subject.  A man that coincidentally I recognized.  I had also met him that first night on a street corner in Somnopolis.  It was this angry blind guy that had bumped into me when I left the Angel’s limousine.

Turns out his name was Bruce Banner.  He had been involved in some sort of nuclear accident that had left him blind.  And perpetually pissed off.

There he was, on all the world’s papers the morning after.  It was the picture that summed it up best in all the world’s papers the next morning was of the great green hulk that Banner had become under the influence of X’s machine, with his powerful hands across Galactus’ throat, the alien on his knees.

So, was it worth it what the Professor did?

He was instrumental in saving the world.  But what about New York?  His first experiment didn’t work out so well, and all those people died.  And no one, either in New York or in Somnopolis was ever consulted about their decision.  I like to think that people deserve a choice.  I like to think that there are plenty of people who would act heroically if an emergency happened.  New York proved that as well.

Some days after everything happened, I went back to the construction site.  It was being put to use for real this time.  I climbed up the gravel hill to look at the river.

There was someone familiar there.

“No more buildings appearing overnight,” he said.

“Nothing but hard work ahead if Somnopolis wants to keep on growing.”  I answered.

“Not to mention all the rebuilding that’s going to have to happen after the fight between those two,” said the Angel.

I didn’t say a word for a moment.  Where was he headed with this?

Warren Worthington didn’t say anything for a while.  He looked at the construction site, looked at me, and finally said.  “I think you’re ready to hear about that job offer I have for you. “

I think he’s right…

Cyclops and the Angel came down from the hill and began to talk specifics about their hopes, about their individual responsibilities, and about the future…

 THE END

AUTHOR’S NOTES:

Talk about a mix and match storyline!

When I first took this challenge up in October, I was in the midst of writing a new series over at Marvel Dark Design. For the Lambert Challenge I was given specific characters to use.  One was Mephisto.  So, I was going to use Mephisto here and Galactus in Surfer.  I switched ‘em.  If the FF didn’t exist, I thought it fairly plausible that Professor X would step up to the challenge of stopping him.  And with no Ultimate Nullifier at hand, I figured, this might be a plausible idea of what he’d do.  Plus it gave me the chance to combine the character of Marvel’s Prof X. with Dean Motter’s Mr X, and gave a raison d’etre for Somnopolis.

So anyway, I wanted to give my thanks to Brent Lambert for the challenge and opportunity to work on this series.

And a shout out to Mike Rasbury – It’s been a blast working with you on Defenders.  I hope I succeeded in making Cyclops “cool”.