"Oh my stars and garters!"
Beast's hand was moving to activate Cerebro's emergency shutdown mechanism. With his animal reflexes already engaged he had moments to try to understand what had happened. Emma and Jean's conscious and near-conscious brainwaves had been steadily synchronizing but suddenly and impossibly their deep cortical brainwaves - the animal parts of their brains - had synchronized too.
The telepathic energy being fed into and amplified by the M'Krann fragment had spiked impossibly. Now it was enough to create a feedback loop. The fragment was feeding psychic energy back into the telepaths' brains, allowing their mind-link to deepen further and feed even more telepathic strength through Cerebro into the crystal.
The M'Krann crysal briefly blazed with psychic energy, like a strobbing stellar nova of telepathic light.
Then it exploded along with every screen in the Cerebro chamber. Emma and Jean convulsed once and went still. But not before Jean's uncontrolled telekinetic powers shredding the women's clothes and smashed wildly through Beast's delicate and already damaged equipment.When the psychic torrent of force carried away his consciousness Beast's blue hand was still barely halfway to the shutdown controls.
Beast came to as an emergency team of X-Men first responders were already stretchering Jean and Emma out of the ruined chamber. Dazed as he was Beast tore free of Paige Guthrie's helping hands and leaped towards the women who had been injured or worse in his experiment. To his relief he could make out the beep of heart monitors on both women and apart from their shredded costumes they both appeared unharmed. Unharmed but unconscious.
"Dr. McCoy," Cecilia Reyes told him severely, "we need to get you to the sickbay."
"Excellent notion. I shall accompany these stretchers. We can discuss the merits of the phrase 'physician heal thyself' as I conduct a first examination - as we walk, as we walk - of my two patients."
Cecilia looked as if we she were about to argue but a flash of sympathy swept over her face before it was hidden beneath professional detachment. Beast looked away for a moment. Was his guilt about what he had allowed to happen here so obvious?
But Beast didn't have time to dwell on his sins. The caravan of the unconscious and partially amnesiac, walking or at least loping wounded and all those who had rushed to the evacuation moved speedily out."
If these readings are right they're in shallow comas, practically deep dreaming sleep," Cecilia was looking at a portable ECG, "But their short term memories are certainly gone."
Nor did Beast have time to dwell on what had happened, and if Cecilia was right he might never be able to find out.