*I'm too lazy to go to my room and horde of comics and look up how to spell everything—I wanna get to the story!—so I'll just wait until you wonderful people tell me the absent names so I can put 'em in! Yeah, yeah, I know, I—hey, watch the rotten fruit, bub!

RATING: It's there for a reason. This is Scratch, and he has the girlfriend of the man he hates most in the world in his tortured, sadistic grasp. And he's going to use her to get Pete. But that doesn't mean he isn't going to enjoy spending time torturing her in every way possible his horrible, disgusting, evil mind can come up with. And I mean every way. Not for the faint of heart... My friend says I play and write a great twisted bad guy. Not sure if that's a compliment or not—she isn't either, actually—but I'll just take it to mean that I really am a good actress, and destined to work for Marvel, 'cause boy-o-boy do they have some twisted villains there. So this will be dark. This will be ugly. This will be violent. This will be gruesome. And the worst part? It isn't late at night while I write this part...

NOTE: This story doesn't really fit into continuity...but then again, what does continuity matter to the team that used to be Excalibur? After all, once Ben Raab got his hands on them, that little detail was shown to be as unimportant as it really was, wasn't it? Well, continuity aside, I hope I at least capture the characters better than he did—you know, making them act/talk/react like them? Anyway, I'm giving it my best shot, and while it doesn't really fit into anything, it's post-Dreamnails and pre-Raab. Enjoy. Or not. Whatever. Just review it, whatever your feelings...but if you want to get into an argument with me on Raab, please include your e-mail address (and the number of the psychiatrist you're seeing for those views...) Enough delay. Here's the story...whether you like it or not...put it down to a very disturbed sleepover that involved much talking and no sleeping and some very disturbed thoughts that can invade brains when such happens...especially when a comic convention is involved...

The bald man with the odd, sun-shaped tattoo on his forehead and the rumbled, ill-fitting black suit should have attracted attention. Even in Soho, London, he seemed a little out of place, and he wasn't quite in Soho right now. However, he managed to practically escape notice completely. He had a talent for that: blending in. Either with a crowd or with shadows, it didn't matter to him. Little things like that didn't matter.

The sounds of the city school a few buildings down letting out for the weekend caught his notice, though. Should a passerby have happened to have seen him watching the small elementary students yelling and skipping in their freedom, they might have felt sympathy for the thin man when they saw the hunger with which he watched the little children. Perhaps he was merely a childless man who longed for one, they might think, or perhaps one of the little tykes is his, only the mum and he called it splits and he hardly gets to see it. They would have been wrong if they followed any path of similar reasoning. They would have been correct about the hunger, though. Little children gave off really delightful screams and looks when they died; the rumbled man knew that well and enjoyed it more. The way his tongue twitched over his lips for a second and the look in his eyes would have given the lie to compassionate thoughts directed at him by any passerbys who happened to notice him.

But Scratch was never noticed...