Okay… so, um… I wrote this one on my own. ( that's me, as in Deji. And without Goober.) This is sort of a prequel to the one that Goober and I are writing together. This is all made up of my (and Goober's) ideas, except for the whole basic Institute/ mutant bird kid/ crazy whitecoat/ Eraser/ etcetera. Those are all (you guessed it!) James Patterson's. Not ours. We just came up with the idea to use them.


Chapter one: Moi

I woke up to a nasally buzzing noise, signaling that it was now 4:30 am, and sleeping in would not be rewarded. I hated that noise. It hurt my ears. Grumbling, I rolled off my hard bunk to file out into the cold hallway with everyone else. I hated them. I knew that they hated me, too. They didn't exactly try to keep it a secret. We lined up in the hallway, single file along one of the walls, in order for roll call. A whitecoat came out with a clipboard. Cliché. He read out "names," and deep, gruff voices responded quickly. I hated the whitecoats. All of them. I hated being the only girl. "70921ASP," demanded the whitecoat. "Present." I hated being a number. Sometimes I was called Aspen, if anyone bothered to talk to me. They never did. I hated watching them all play cards and talk jokingly from the edges of the room. I hated everything.

Roll call was over. The Erasers filed into a mess hall-type thing. Printed over the doorway, like on all of the rooms, were the words "The Institute of Higher Living." We got our food and sat at a table. I sat at the end, away from the other Erasers.

Well, to say "the other Erasers" isn't exactly accurate. Because I'm not exactly an Eraser. I was (surprise!) an experiment. They wanted to see if they could make a better Eraser. The originals were too slow and uncoordinated. I had to agree with them on that point. They wanted to make something faster, more agile. So instead of infusing me with the usual wolf DNA before birth, they tried fox. With some avian DNA sprinkled on for effect. So now I had 13-foot wings, and turned into a reddish-brown, more slender version of Hollywood's wolfman whenever I felt the slightest inclination to do so.

Obvious from the fact I was still living, their experiment had succeeded. Just barely. There were a couple things that they weren't happy with about me. First, I was a girl. I guess that scientifically, females were weaker and more compassionate than males. Supposedly. Not very Erasery attributes, to tell the truth. I was also smarter. This could be due to the previous glitch, but none of them considered that, of course. It must have been a lot easier to boss around a bunch of beastly morons (Erasers), than someone with an IQ higher than that of moldy hot dogs.

There was this other thing that I didn't plan on letting them find out about. I could tell when someone was lying. It was more than just some talent I'd picked up. I could just tell. I knew that if they ever found out about that, they probably wouldn't keep me. Alive.

So, I was valuable enough to keep alive, but I had too many flaws to duplicate me.

And that was why I sat alone, playing with my…food. (For lack of a better word.) That was why I sat at the end of the table every day, hating the world that I was forced to face completely alone.