L-Force: Twin Torture

Alright! Another one (finally)! Sorry it took me so long to get this one posted, I hit some REALLY bad writer's block with it. Anyway, I think this one will go well/be a good one. The last one was a really important one for the series, especially this season, but this one...not so much. Well, it is important in some respects that become important in themselves for the story altogether...and I'm talking too much, aren't I? Anyway, hope you enjoy it! On with the story!

Chapter 1

"OK," said Kyra as she led 4 kids into the hideout, "welcome to L-Force, this is the hideout, blah, blah, blah, yadda, yadda, yadda, etc. etc. All you gotta do is meet everyone." She whistled loudly, getting everyone's attention. They all looked at her. "Alright. Guys, everyone. Everyone, Ingrid, Max, Paula, and Quinn. Ingrid's a Witch and Quinn's a Warlock."

Cassandra walked up to them. "Hey. Cassandra."

Ingrid, a redhead whose hair was brownish-tinted, smiled. "Hi."

"So what can you guys do?"

"Heat vision and ice vision," Ingrid answered for herself.

"Huh," Nathan said, coming up, "I have X-ray vision and night vision."

Max, a fennec fox, smiled. "And I have enhanced vision."

Ace came up. "Hey. So do I!"

"Actually, mine is more 'enhance' like 'zoom in'."

"Oh."

"And I can unlock any lock."

"He's our skeleton key," Paula said. She was a chipmunk, believe it or not. Her eyes were sunset (reddish-orange) and her shoulder-length brunette hair had a streak of grey and a streak of white (to match the stripes on her back). And she was pretty thin for a chipmunk. "Meanwhile, I can…let me demonstrate." She held out her hand and a rainbow spread through the room. Tech put his hand through it and felt nothing. Illusion, Paula sent out to everyone in the room, and telepathy.

"Wow," said Orion, "I'm impressed."

Quinn (a brunette boy with brown eyes) scoffed. "My poderes are en el momento que fresco."

Subtitles: My powers are just as cool.

"What did he say?" asked Zara.

"I don't know," said Paula, "He was in Spanish!"

"Maybe you should've read the subtitle," said Nathan.

"Huh?"

"Nothing."

Quinn smirked. "I'm omnilingual."

"Which means…" Kyra egged him on.

"I can speak any language."

"Oh."

"And by touching a book, I automatically memorize it. I call it speed-reading."

"That one will help." Kyra snapped her fingers and Slam struggled over with a huge pile of heavy books. He dropped them in a heap on the floor by them.

"You want me to go through all of these," Quinn said.

"Exactly," Kyra said, smiling, "See the Dark Side has this…creature on their side calling herself Wake, an Oasis. We don't know what that means, so we were going to go through all these books. We knew it would take a while, so I guess you can help us out with this."

Quinn looked at the books for a few more seconds. "Fine. I'll call it my first assignment." He picked up a few books, checking them, and laid them on the floor to make a chair.

Wake walked around the main room of the 5-story building. "There's a room for me…I could get used to this."

"Nice place," said Zack, following her.

"What we had was just fine," said Deirdre, "until your dumb sister and her friends decided to come along and knock it down. If it weren't for Wake here, we would never have survived!"

Scarlet walked up. "Hey, I see this—did you get a garden for me?" Deirdre nodded. "I see this as an improvement."

Claire forced out a smile. "Totally and completely." She looked at Xavier. He sighed and shrugged.

Priscilla looked at them. She knew something was up. The only reason she hadn't already turned them in to Wake and Deirdre and the Vamps…was because she was having the same thoughts occasionally…

Quinn had been going through a cycle all day of picking up a book, thinking, and tossing it aside. That night, when Paula and Kyra came in, he was gone.

"I think we lost him in this mess," Paula said.

Kyra looked around. "Quinn?"

"In here," was the muffled reply.

Paula ran over and pulled him out of the heap of books.

Kyra smirked, fighting off the urge to giggle.

Quinn brushed himself off. "I have been reading all day. I intend to get some sleep! If you need me, I'll be outside for the next 5 minutes and then in bed!" He stormed out of the hideout. He walked out of the front door of the hut above it and walked around to the back. He started to lean against the wall and felt a slight burn. He pulled his hand back and saw a message engraving itself in the wall:

Look in the bushes.

He heard a rustling and whirled around. One bush twitched a little, but whoever was there was already gone. He walked over to the bush and reached in, pulling out a book. He then speed-read it and his eyes widened. "Oh, boy." He ran back into the hideout to see that Kyra and Paula were still there. "Guys! I got it!"

"What'd you get?" asked Paula, walking over to him.

"Just get everyone in here now!"

Priscilla snuck into the building. She looked around to make sure no one was there. All the lights were out—which meant the team members were all asleep—and Wake wasn't out—which meant she was in her sound-proofed room, probably pacing or "watching." She sighed inwardly with relief. Suddenly, a knife flew at her, just barely missing her head. She whirled around to see Zack walking into the building after her.

Zack started to slowly walk over to her, his reddish-black eyes glaring at her intensely. "I saw that."

"I-I can explain."

Zack pushed her against the wall. "You gave the Loonies the Book of Taurus, didn't you? Deirdre stole that to make sure they didn't find out about Wake!"

"It's not a fair fight unless you know your opponent. It's not like it's gonna make a difference anyway."

"It's not supposed to be a fair fight! We know our opponents. Period. We have me. They don't need to know anything about us. They have Cassandra, that little traitor."

Priscilla looked him straight in the eyes. "She left before you came. You have no right to call her a traitor. Jeff and Axel may cover me, but I make my own decisions. I did what I had to do, end of story! You may be Deirdre and Wake's top warrior now, but that's as far as yours goes. What I did tonight is the greatest I will step out of bounds. I promise you that."

Zack half-smiled. "OK." He grabbed the knife. "Then this is as far as I step against you."

After he made his move, her scream could be heard for miles around.

"So what do you got?" Gail asked, settling on the couch.

Quinn took a deep breath then started his speech: "Alright, get this: Wake's been on the planet before."

"This planet?" Howie asked.

"Yup," Quinn continued, "See, back in about 1800—almost 1000 years ago—she came along. She found a small village and—mainly as a Vampire—devoured the whole place. Slowly rising to full power, she tried to take over and ultimately destroy the world. Turns out, she'd been a hell-child. She'd fought off the gods of the Underworld to rise to our dimension and rule it and…burn it up in a scourge of bloody fire." Everyone pictured that and shuddered. "Anyway, the Saviors—the champions of the age, who were in our place—banished her from the living realm to 'the Land of Nothingness' and made it so that she couldn't be reawakened by mortals."

"But Deirdre is a mortal, mutant or not," said Arra.

"No, she's not," said Cassandra, "During the nightmare fest a while ago, her nightmares didn't come true. I was wondering why she'd been unaffected by such a weird all-out spell and asked her what was going on and she said that she'd been immune to magic like that ever since she and her brother drank from some pool…over 50 years ago. She's not 21, she's been alive and young for over 60 years. She's not human. Neither was her brother."

"Whoa…" Sandra wondered over that.

"Well, that's hard to believe," said Byron.

"But it's gotta be true," said Quinn, "Mortals, mutant or no, can't do this ritual. Deirdre must have been collecting the 'ingredients' for this ritual before her brother died, that jewel being one of them. Anyway, the ritual to raise Wake is to collect the 5 Jewels and 1010 souls and perform this ritual, but Wake doesn't get her full power until she's taken and gathered all of the souls…and a couple missing ingredients that the book says even the Saviors themselves didn't know about. Whether or not Wake and Deirdre or anybody else on the Dark Side knows about that is undetermined."

"So the only question remaining is what is an Oasis and how do we kill it," said Lexi.

"That's 2 questions," said Tech.

"Uh…that answer is the one I was hoping you weren't gonna ask for," said Quinn.

"What?" asked Ingrid.

"Well…" Quinn sighed. "Alright, let's get this over with. An Oasis is a combination of every magic creature ever to have existed."

"OK, so what's so bad about that?" asked Zara, "And what about the other question?"

"The answer to the other question is what's so bad about it. Every way to kill one creature is cancelled out by another: Vampires are killed by sunlight and stakes to the heart, but that only injures a Werewolf; Werewolves are killed by a silver bullet, but bullets don't harm Vampires; and Goblins and Trolls and Ogres and everything else all cancel each other out. Decapitation, sure, but not until she's at full power and by then she'd be too strong for us to get that near to her. There is no proper way to kill her!"

[Music swells.]

"That's it," said Duck, "We're doomed."