WARREN BLINKED AND realized he was somewhere else. Not in a cargo bay on the Enterprise, but in a meadow surrounded by fragrant pine trees, where birds sang and flitted from branch to branch.

He recognized the place. It was on the grounds of the Xavier Inst.i.tute for Higher Learning-the exact same spot where he and his fellow X-Men had arrived after they left the Enterprise the last time.

At the time, they had believed themselves home. Then they had been bathed in a bright, blinding light-and the next thing they knew, they had turned up on Starbase 88, in another reality entirely.

Warren looked at Ororo, who was standing beside him. The two of them were afraid to say anything. They were waiting for the other shoe to drop.

But it didn't. There was no bright light. They stayed right where they were, apparently fixed in time and s.p.a.ce.

Finally, it was Colossus who broke the silence. "Unless I am mistaken," he said, "it seems we are home."

"So it does," Banshee agreed.

"Back in Salem Center," Nightcrawler declared.

"Where we belong," Shadowcat added.

Home, thought Warren. What a nice place to be.

Filled with a sudden rush of exhilaration, he spread his great, white wings and soared straight up into the heavens. And he didn't stop for a long, long time.

Hidden behind a stand of closely grown pine trees, the omnipotent ent.i.ty known as Q removed his sungla.s.ses to watch Archangel ascend into the vibrant summer sky. Replacing his gla.s.ses, he folded one leg over the other, sat back in his lawn chair and sipped his pina colada.

"You see?" he said to the gigantic personage standing beside him. "I told you it would work just fine."

The Watcher, eons-old scion of an immortal race, shook his ma.s.sive, hairless head and adjusted his majestic robes.

"I have seen one being after another tamper with the integrity of Time and s.p.a.ce," the Watcher replied in his expansive, echoing voice, "Kang being a prime example. Yet none of them ever seemed to obtain the results he desired."

Q grinned. "That's because none of them were me, Watcher old bean. A yank here, a tug there, and the Enterprise's timehook-which was in storage on Starbase 88-wound up saturated with verteron particles. That, in turn, drew the X-Men to the Enterprise's universe, where they were eminently available to help solve the mutant crisis on Xhaldia. What could be simpler?"

"The Xhaldians called them transformed, "the Watcher reminded him. "Not mutants."

"They're all the same to me," said Q. "The point is the X-men were in the right place at the right time, and Xhaldia's all the better for it."

"And why do you care so much about Xhaldia?" the Watcher inquired.

Q cast a sidelong look at him. "I thought you people just watched. No one said you asked questions."

"Nonetheless," the Watcher pressed, "you must have had a reason for sparing Xhaldia so much misery."

Q thought for a moment. "Let's just say I've got my eye on the Xhaldians and leave it at that, all right?"

The Watcher frowned. "I can hardly do otherwise. I, like all my kind, have sworn never to interfere in the affairs of others."

Q chuckled. "And a lovely policy it is, my friend-though, I must tell you, you don't know what you're missing."

Suddenly, he snapped the fingers of his free hand and made his pina colada vanish, gla.s.s and all. Then he stood up, snapped his fingers again, and the lawn chair disappeared as well-along with the sungla.s.ses.

"Well," he told the Watcher, "got to go. You know how it is-places to grow and people to be. But don't worry-I'll be in touch."

The gargantuan figure nodded his head. "I'm certain you will be."

Q smiled mischievously. "Perhaps sooner than you think-though sooner is such a relative term."

Leaving the Watcher with that morsel to chew on, Q snapped his fingers a third time-and, at least for the moment, vanished from the X-Men's reality without a trace.