"Guys, come check out this cupboard! You can like, walk into it!" Gazzy stood in the kitchen. Of course he did. All he ever thought about nowadays was his stomach and making bombs.
"Yeah, that's pretty good Gazzy, but did you check out the upstairs floor? Or should I say, floors? There are three!" Angel called from the third floor.
The old -fashioned spiraling staircase wound it's way around the entire foyer, leaving the place roomy enough to fly in pretty large circles. To say the least, it was the largest area open enough to fly in that I'd ever seen "indoors.
Nudge's grinning, yet slightly maniacal, face peered out over the railing. "Max, I found the computer room," she called, the corner of what looked like a laptop teetering dangerously over the edge next to her face.
"Be careful with the electronics honey. You don't want anybody's money to have been wasted because you dropped the things over the edge," I said, hoping I didn't need to make an emergency take off to catch the computer because of Nudge's carelessness.
"I'm not completely nuts. Yet. Anyways, why would I drop anything over the railing? I might hit you or Fang on the head," she said, and giggled at the surprised look on my face.
I quickly wiped the emotion-revealing look off my face, and whipped around to find Fang staring at me, apparently amused by my lack of attentiveness as to where he was.
"Very funny. It's not like I wasn't paying attention. Just paying more attention to something else. Just like you were paying more attention to something else," I said, referring to his stare.
As always, his dark eyes revealed nothing, but I smirked anyway, knowing my comment had irked him.
Okay, so that probably wasn't very nice, but I'm not always a nice person, okay? In fact, with all the destruction that generally happens around me, I wouldn't be surprised to be classified as a unanimously voted not nice person.
He turned away, slinking off to find a room to claim. Even though he had always had the natural ability to mask his feelings, the slight embarrassment that I had noticed exactly what he was staring at emanated off of him. Or maybe that was my embarrassment. Either way, it was embarrassment aura just waiting to be noticed.
I followed Fang up the stairs to try and find a room. It didn't look like any of the rooms were customized, so I ducked into each one to find a shape or area I just liked in general.
Okay, so that's probably not the best way to judge a room, but it worked for me. Turned out that the first room I found had a skylight and a roomy, empty space.
My only thought at that time was, "Cool. A window in the ceiling." After a more thorough examination later, I realized that the whole ceiling was made of glass. No more claustrophobia for Max.
Anyway, after helping Angel settle into her room, I went to find Mom. She was, surprise, surprise, in the kitchen baking her famous chocolate chip cookies. (So maybe famous is an exaggeration, but their famous in my head, okay? They should be famous anyway. But no. The teens of today aren't interested in chocolate chip cookies. Stupid modern celebrities.)
"Hey Mom. What's up?" I said, snagging a fresh cookie off the tray.
"Nothing much. How are you and the others settling in? Fang didn't seem so… What's the word… Fangish. Or maybe he was more Fangish….," my mom said, trying to find a word for Fang's mood.
"The flock just calls that being Fang. What did he say?" I asked, wondering if I needed to go punch Fang in the gut for being rude to my mom. (Okay, so maybe I wouldn't really do that, but that doesn't mean I can't get after him about it.)
"Well, he didn't actually say anything. Not anything rude anyway," I relaxed my grip on the kitchen counter. "He just came and asked if we were going to go get some paint and stuff soon. I think he wanted to paint his room black," my mom said, hoping I wouldn't lose my temper at Fang because of what she said.
Mom had always been really ready to please, with the flock anyway. Maybe it was because she hadn't known me for the majority of my life, but still. It was kind of nice most of the time, but it occasionally got on my nerves.
The flock and I aren't all that used to being treated like royalty. And in my opinion, we shouldn't be treated that way at all. It'll just set us up for disaster if we need to go back into hiding. (I know that the chance of Flyboys or some other mutant coming back was slim to none, but I don't want to be taking any chances.