Chapter 160: Did Professor X Transmigrate?
Eighty million was a substantial number, though not unreachable for someone who could bend metal with a thought and had decades of practice applying that to practical problems. Magneto transferred the full amount without deliberation.
With the contract settled, Matthew didn't move immediately on Vought. Instead he drove to the Xavier School for Gifted Youngsters.
His relationship with Professor X wasn't close by any meaningful measure. But it qualified as friendship, and a friend had been unconscious for two months for no apparent reason. That required a visit in person regardless.
It also required an explanation. Nothing in the original story's timeline accounted for this.
He parked at the school gate. Nikki and Eveline had come with him.
Nikki because Professor X had been the one to resolve her guilt block, and showing up to check on him was the right thing to do. Eveline because Matthew needed her psychic capability to look directly into what was keeping Xavier under. If the man couldn't speak, then someone would have to read the answer out of him.
He pressed the gate buzzer.
The security guard who appeared was a broad man pushing two meters, built like something that had been assembled for confrontational situations. His eyes moved over Matthew, Nikki, and Eveline with the practiced suspicion of someone doing their job.
"Help you?"
"I'm here to see Professor Xavier."
"Professor Xavier isn't receiving visitors. He's been unwell. You'll need to come back another time."
The guard turned away without waiting for a response.
"If I were you," Matthew said through the gate, his voice even, "I'd go let whoever's running things in there know I'm here before deciding that on their behalf."
The guard paused. He turned back and looked at Matthew properly for the first time, then at the car parked behind him. The car was a limited production model of the kind that existed in quantities of three figures globally.
The guard's posture changed by a degree.
"I apologize. Your name, sir?"
"Matthew Lawrence."
The guard's expression ran through several revisions in quick succession. "Lawrence. Matthew Lawrence." He caught up with something. The impatience he'd been wearing came off completely.
"The one who funded the treatment that got the man in the wheelchair back on his feet?"
Something close to respect surfaced in his face. "I've heard of you, sir. Give me just a moment."
He jogged back toward the building.
Five minutes later, Logan came out.
"Hey. Matthew. It's been a while."
"It has." They shook hands.
"Sorry for the short notice. Didn't have time to prepare anything properly. Picked these up on the way." Matthew handed him a box. Well-packaged, sealed properly against the weather.
Logan opened it, looked at what was inside, and something lit up in his expression. "Padrón Anniversary. The fifty-year series." He weighed the box briefly. "This isn't cheap, even for me."
"Appreciate it."
Matthew told the guard to bring everything in the trunk inside for the students. Logan led them through the gate and into the school.
"So what brought you out here?" Logan glanced over at Matthew as they walked.
"Word reached me that Professor Xavier had gone into an unexplained coma. Umbrella's medical division has resources. I came to see if there was anything we could do."
Logan let out a long breath.
"It's been two months since it happened."
"I thought about bringing him to your facility early on. But we ran brainwave monitoring and found that even with him completely under, his neural activity is extremely high. Like he's in the middle of a very long dream and can't come back from it."
"Your company's been busy. Didn't want to add to that."
He said it without any particular edge to it, just as a fact.
Matthew took it the same way.
They reached Xavier's room.
Xavier was lying inside a medical unit with enough integrated instrumentation to stock a small clinic. Metal tubing ran connections at the head and foot of the housing, feeding continuous readings from sensors monitoring his vital signs.
Matthew walked up to it and listened.
Heart rate steady. Blood moving normally through the circulatory system. Xavier's physical condition, from what Matthew could hear, was completely healthy.
"Two months of this. No change at all?"
"Nothing. Just lies there."
"If the monitors weren't picking up the brain activity, we'd have assumed the worst a long time ago."
Logan looked at him. "You have any ideas?"
"I have one approach. Can't guarantee results."
Logan put a hand on his shoulder. "That's more than we've got. Go ahead and try."
"We're working blind right now anyway. Worst that happens, we try something and it doesn't work. And if he dies from it, we can always go back in time and fix it." He said the last part with the flat delivery of someone who had done exactly that before and filed it under available options.
The actual meaning underneath it: do what you can. As long as it doesn't kill him, we're ahead.
Matthew looked at Eveline.
She looked back at him. A single nod.
Her eyes went white.
An invisible current pushed outward from her and entered the active, humming neural landscape of Xavier's brain.
Sweat appeared on her forehead almost immediately.
The expression on her face was not comfortable.
Whatever Xavier's consciousness was doing in there, even in this suspended state, the sheer psychic mass of it was not something Eveline could push through easily. It was like trying to wade through something that had weight in every direction.
Five minutes passed.
When Eveline came back, she sat down on the floor and breathed for a moment.
"What did you find?" Matthew asked.
She nodded, getting her breath in order.
"He was in there." She paused. "And he tried to communicate."
"What did he say?" Logan couldn't wait for the full sentence.
"He said..." Eveline collected herself. "When I got into his consciousness, his awareness was present. He knew I was there. He told me that for reasons he doesn't understand, his consciousness drifted into a younger version of himself."
"The version he found himself in was fighting alongside Magneto. He said they were working to stop Sebastian Shaw."
"He was very clear: it wasn't a dream. He's certain he's actually inside a parallel version of himself in a different timeline."
"As for why it happened..."
She looked at Matthew. "He said you need to find someone called the Ancient One."
"She may know the answer."
Matthew and Logan both went quiet at the same time.
This had gotten considerably more complicated.
Eveline, who had said everything she needed to say, quietly lost consciousness and folded to the floor. Several strands of her hair, when Matthew looked at her, had gone white.
The psychic link had cost her something.
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