A.N. I noticed while writing this that I don't actually have a name for my main character, possible choices are on my profile and the poll is open. Please vote for a name on my profile. Also, this chapter gets a bit darker, but I'm not sure exactly how rating systems work, so I think it's about a T. No horribly gruesome descriptions (though there is some blood), nothing I consider mature content, and I try to avoid swearing.
There will be absolutely no romance or physical relationships in this story; I've never written one before. Also, my character is an OC so unless I want to make her fall in love with another OC, it would stray far too close to being a self-insert/mary sue, both of which I want to avoid. The description of what the girl looks like is purposefully vague, just imagine her however you want.
10. Breathe
When I woke up, the girl was gone. Along with all the money I had in the apartment, a bag, some clothes, and as much food as one person could feasibly carry. There was a note:
I know now you only wanted to help. I'm sorry.
Of course everything could be replaced, and it wasn't like I was cleaned out, and I would have probably given her the stuff anyway, but still. The thief got robbed; there's irony to make my day.
Of course, I now had a stolen car sitting out front which complicated things.
11. Memory
When I looked outside, it was already dark. I must have been knocked out for several hours at least, and now the police would probably be looking for the car I had stolen. It would have been nice if I could have made the car disappear, but some things were too large to move. The first time I tried with something that big, I woke up an hour and a half later with the worst headache in my life. Needless to say, I never tried again.
All this meant I had to leave the area. Someone would have already seen the car parked in front of the building, and I didn't want to be here when they asked my fellow renters. It wasn't like they could find me in a new city. The police had nothing to use that could find me; I hadn't been fingerprinted ever, and the apartment had been rented under a fake name.
So, I put everything from my apartment into stasis, packed a small backpack with some clothes for show, and set out into the larger world. Standing under a streetlight on the sidewalk, I got a sudden feeling of déjà vu. The last time I had done something like this, my parents had disowned me a few minutes before.
Now it was completely different circumstances. I was nothing like the scared teenager with nowhere to go and nothing but the clothes on her back. I had purpose—more or less—and I had resources—enough money to buy a small house and enough stuff to fill it to the brim—and I definitely wasn't scared of the streets after dark.
I did, after all, still have the hand gun from being chased the night my life changed. And I had some fireworks. And some smoke bombs left over from the mall distraction. And maybe I had a shotgun or three, several cooking knives, pepper spray, and the ability make everything on another person—including possible weapons and clothes—disappear.
No, I was very different from the person I used to be.
12. Insanity
A teenage girl walking on the streets at night is just asking for trouble.
I was a teenage girl, it was night, I was walking, but when I found trouble, it wasn't looking for me. No, another teenage girl was struggling with a couple of drunks in an alley off the main street. Another familiar teenage girl, wearing clothing that covered up far too much skin for the current climate.
What are the odds?
I had already saved her once, I figured, and what kind of person would I be if I ignored the mutant now? After all, I was already moving to another city because of her, and the men were drunk. One was already lying passed out on the sidewalk.
When another man fell to the ground and didn't get back up, I realized it wasn't the alcohol that knocked him unconscious. It was the girl and her fascinating power. Obviously skin based, as soon as someone touched her they were down for the count. I slipped on a light jacket and a pair of gloves before heading over.
It's amazing how someone's demeanor changes when faced with a pistol. The girl flinched farther back toward the wall she had been cornered against, a very logical reaction when someone who may not like you has a firearm pointed in your direction. She did steal my stuff after knocking me out after all.
Alcohol causes very different reactions in people. One started puking up their guts, which may not have been caused by the threat of a gun. One cowered in fear. Another just stared at me while the last did something extremely stupid. He tried to attack me.
Ok, I admit, if I had been a normal child, and unarmed, it may have worked. Of course, why would I have been out on the streets holding a gun, if I was normal? I would be at home, sleeping in bed. But since I was not normal, his idea as it was failed. Horribly.
Drunk man comes running at girl armed with gun. Girl stares at man for a moment, wondering at man's stupidity. Gun disappears, to be replaced with pepper spray. Pepper spray to eyes + knee to crotch = unconsciousness and pain.
It was rather sad. The guy wasn't even sober, and I have doubts about his sanity.
Of course, he was in good company, I'd doubted my own common sense ever since I had thrown the first smoke bomb at the mall. I also have suspicions about the mutant I'd saved, she was talking to herself when I first saw her.
But still, I know enough not to try to attack someone with a gun.
13. Misfortune
So where was I? Stuck in an alley threatening a bunch of drunks with a stolen hand gun who were as of five minutes ago threatening a mutant girl who I kept running into. The drunks were threatening the girl, not the hand gun, though mutant girl seemed pretty scared of the gun as well as the drunks. Obviously not very good at common sense this one. I'd already saved her from an angry mob and some beer-filled idiots; it wasn't like I would shoot her and undo all my hard work.
Ok, so maybe I'd only found her twice, but both times she was in some kind of trouble that I had to get her out of. That girl really had bad luck. I swear, it's impossible to get in trouble as often as she had without specifically searching for it.
The aforementioned bad luck magnet had been trying to run out of the alleyway without me noticing, while mentally challenged alcoholic and I had our face off. Needless to say, her escape attempt did not succeed. No doubt, upon having possibly completed said escape, mutant girl—I shouldn't really call her that; I, too, am a mutant girl, so the name isn't really unique to her—would probably have run afoul with some other dangerous circumstance. Perhaps an escaped murderer, runaway car, or rabid dog?
However, I didn't need to worry about those things because I stopped her before she left the alley. At which point she tried to tackle me and knock me out again with her obviously skin related, sleep inducing mutation.
I had already experienced her special flavor coma once before, and didn't really want to deal with the headache again, so naturally, I resisted. She fought dirty, but I won in the end, only having to sacrifice half a handful of hair before she gave in to the mighty threatening power of my pistol. I was starting to feel attached to the fire arm. It was the first thing I had stolen with my power, and d*** useful. No one had to know that the thing wasn't currently loaded.
Trusty hand gun or not, at this point trying to help her was becoming a health risk. Life itself was out to get her, it seemed, and it was willing to go through me to get her. I was starting to wonder if the risk was worth it; and now, after nicely threatening her attackers she attacks me. Maybe she wasn't the only one with horrible luck.
And for the record, knocking her out and tying her hands together with duck tape was completely justifiable. She needed protection from herself the girl's luck was so bad. And I needed protection from everything out to get her.
She really wasn't worth the effort, but I sure wasn't just going to let her go; she was the only mutant I'd ever seen, and that was enough to make her interesting.
Besides, I owed her one for earlier.
14. Smile
I ended up taking the girl to a nearby hotel; I could hear the sirens from the police who had found my stolen car, and my apartment was probably being broken into as I walked into the run down building in which I planned to stay for a very short time. It really is a sad world when people don't look twice at someone dragging an unconscious teenage girl into the building, even if it was the bad side of town. The person at the front desk just stared for a second, yawned tiredly, and handed me the room keys.
The hotel was a shabby one, only three stories with cracked plaster, spiders in the corners, and clown pictures grinning creepily with wide eyes from their picture frames on the wall. The place also had no elevator, interestingly enough, and the keys I had gotten were for a room on the third floor. For the second time in 24 hour, I found myself wishing I could use my mutation on living things. That was my top priority, I promised myself. I'd get right on it as soon as my life had calmed down a little, police weren't looking for the car I stole, and stupid bad luck magnet stopped running into my life. Mutant girl who I had seen far too often lately shifted a little as I was trying to carry her, reminding me that she would eventually wake up.
Having already experienced what happened when the girl woke up after I rescued her once, I decided it would be a good idea if she and her mutation stayed away from me for the time being. She got the bed while I perched on a chair watching her breathe from the other side of the room.
It was almost dawn when something finally happened. And by "something happened", I mean she woke up. And by "she woke up", I mean she regained consciousness, but pretended to still be asleep. Let's just say the girl wouldn't be winning any prizes for acting in the near future. When a person suddenly stops breathing, tenses up, and then goes back to normal, it's kind of obvious they aren't asleep anymore.
After five minutes of staring at her while she exercised her horrible acting skills, I got bored. The pretense of sleep was disrupted by a teddy bear landing on her head. She sat up in bed, strangling the poor bear, and looked around the room wildly before her eyes finally met mine. I gave a short wave and smiled, trying not to resemble the demon clowns from the hallway.
She looked at me, obviously confused. I looked at her, wondering what to say now.
And that's when the lights went out, plunging the room into darkness.
15. Silence
Without power to the hotel, the only light came through the window. Have you ever noticed how your other senses increase when it's very dark? Sounds especially are magnified. No matter what time of day it is, something is always making noise. The dripping of the leaky faucet was loud in the relative quiet, dog barked a few times in a nearby building, traffic could be heard in the distance, and, ever so faintly, the footsteps of a person or people sounded on the stairs leading to this level of the hotel.
A rustling noise came from the direction of the bed. I quickly picked out a flashlight towards the sound, and the light showed the girl trying to stealthily creep off the mattress. She froze like a deer in car headlights. The sound of feet in the hallway stopped outside the door and muffled whispering replaced it.
Who would be walking around a dark hotel at this time in the morning? Why did they pick the entrance to this room specifically? I tossed the light to mutant girl sitting on the bed and took out the trusty firearm, pointing it to the door. Hopefully she wouldn't try to brain me with the light while my back was turned. I focused on the hallway outside. Maybe it was nothing, just a drunk idiot. Maybe I was being overly paranoid.
Maybe incredibly bad luck that the other person in the room was deciding to make a reappearance.
The tense silence in the room was temporarily broken with a thud something hitting the door and a crack as the door protested the violent treatment. Yep, it was definitely her bad luck. Someone—probably more than one, maybe some-five or some-ten—was trying to break into the room, and I seriously doubted they wanted to help me.
Another thud, another crack. Whatever the rest of the hotel may have been like, the doors seemed to be surprisingly sturdy. I doubted it would last much longer, though.
Now, to be, or not to be? A mutant, that is. I doubted whoever was currently wielding the battering ram was after me specifically; the other girl had been much less discrete. Poor girl, she really wasn't having a good past few days. I doubt they knew much about me, though.
On one hand mutant sympathizers were probably treated better than actual mutants when kidnapped and I probably wouldn't wake up tied to an operating table. On the other hand, there was the possibility that if I used my mutation I wouldn't have to worry about waking up in unfamiliar places at all. I hadn't tried it out at all in violent situations, though—idiot drunks don't count—and it wasn't exactly an offensive power. I vanished the gun.
Non-mutant but sympathizer it was then.
Crack. The door broke in two after a final hit and men dressed in dark clothing poured into the room. Mutant girl gave a kind of screech and dropped the flashlight, shadows danced on the walls in the unreliable light, and I felt like someone had just stabbed me with a tack as what was little light was left faded to black.
16. Questioning
When I woke up, I was tied to a chair in one of those classic interrogation room settings. You know, white walls, metal table, mirror on one of the walls that obviously had people watching from the other side.
My plan to get captured and not end up experimented on succeeded apparently; now I just had to conceal the fact that I was a mutant long enough to find a convenient time to make my escape. An escape that would be much easier when people underestimated me.
Maybe I was a mutant, but mutations weren't always extremely useful in a fight. The only nonfatal thing mine was good for was disarming people. Hopefully no one I ran into would be good at hand to hand combat while naked, although I could never be too sure. If all else failed… Well, I did specify nonfatal use for a reason.
I waited in the white room for a while, staring at my reflection in the one way window and planning escape routes. The handcuffs would be easy enough to get out of, same with the door. Depending on who came in, I could most likely sit quietly until they got bored and left me alone.
I hadn't tried vanishing a wall before, but the way it worked my mutation was all or nothing—given a sheet of paper I couldn't just cut a hole in it with my power—and I'd probably end up with the whole building instead depending on how it was built. If a car was enough to knock me out and give me a headache, I didn't want to test anything larger.
A person? I didn't want to test whether that fell into the fatal side of things unless I had to.
I was just contemplating going back to sleep when the door opened and someone walked in. Obviously military from his clothing, he sat down across the table and started asking questions. My guess was right; they had been after my… friend? Could I call her that? She was more of an annoyance that kept attracting trouble.
So, anyway, back to the interrogation; hopefully if they'd been after me their information would have been much more complete—as in, it would have existed; they knew nothing about me—so my plan of underestimation was working. As for the questions, I had planned to stay silent, but telling obvious lies was more fun.
Name? Jane Doe. Age? Haven't you ever heard that you're not supposed to ask that of a girl? Nationality? Martian. Place of birth? Mars, obviously.
This man had evidently had very little experience with teenage lack of respect for authority, because he got angry really fast. Then he got quiet—probably tried the good old "count to ten" idea—and threatened me.
He started out outlining everything I could be arrested for. Apparently, I was facing charges of property damage and assault from the mall, grand theft auto, more assault because of the whole drunk idiot thing, one of the drunks saw me carrying a firearm without a license, resisting arrest even though I hardly struggled even after they broke the door down, and, to top it all off, truancy. Apparently yesterday was a Friday and I looked young enough that I should have been at school.
So, once the threat had been put on the table he offered me a way out of trouble. I answer a few questions, they forget everything I'd done in the last few days, find my parents, or put me in a nice foster home. As if. Who actually wanted to go to a foster home? I had done fine by myself thanks but no thanks.
He didn't ask me about myself this time—I'd lied before, why should I tell the truth now?—but wanted to know all I could tell about mutant girl I'd rescued twice, or had I saved her three times now? The questions made me happy—she must have stayed quiet about herself if they were asking me these things—and worried for her safety—she was an uncooperative mutant and people didn't like those.
I didn't even jokingly answer those questions, just sat there staring at him until he pulled out a gun.
Yep, I was definitely worried for her safety.
17. Threat
Tell me, what do you do when someone threatens you with a gun?
Panic. Then take a deep breath, calm down, and steal the ammunition from out of the weapon.
After having rendered the threat harmless, I kept quiet. Inwardly, I was extremely anxious to find out if he'd brought the thing out only to scare me, or if he'd actually end up trying to kill me. What the heck was this place if people go around pointing guns at normal—well, I could kind of pass for normal if you squinted and didn't know me really well—teenagers and threatened to shoot them.
Maybe he was bluffing, but maybe he wasn't. Either way, this person was crazy, dangerous and doing something illegal. I was an American citizen, and every American citizen had the right to remain silent as seen on TV. Every American citizen also had the right not to get shot while using that right. There was probably something about a right to not get arrested for no good reason in some legal document in Washington, but I doubted the person sitting across from me with a gun pointing at my head cared.
Sane people don't tie teenage girls up, lock them in white rooms, and threaten to kill them.
Even if the weapon was no longer loaded and technically therefore I wasn't in immediate danger, the principle of the matter was still there. When a pistol is aimed in your direction, you act scared.
Acting scared didn't mean that I answered his questions though.
The man got angrier and angrier and started yelling at me to answer the questions. He was furious that I wouldn't tell them anything true. Suddenly, his voice became very quiet. He gripped the gun in both hands, flipped off the safety, and kept the barrel pointed my direction. I had until the count of three to start talking, he said.
One. I just watched him. These people were dangerous if they were willing to kill a mostly innocent teenager in cold blood. And if they would do that, what else would the do to achieve their goals? I definitely needed to step up my escape plans, and while I was at it, finding and helping anyone else trapped here was probably a good idea.
Two. The finger on the trigger tensed. He blinked, and shifted his grip on the gun, aiming it between my eyes. How many times had he done this before? I looked at the mirror behind him, saw myself in it. The white wall behind me framed my face. How much longer would the walls stay clean?
Three. The man wasn't bluffing. I was getting out of here now.
Click.
He didn't really think I was just a normal person, did they?
The world changes after someone tries to kill you. People aren't intrinsically good anymore. And, maybe, some of them shouldn't stay alive.
I tilted my head and smiled at him as he stared in bewilderedly at the gun. He looked at me suddenly, suspicious. The gun disappeared from his hand, and reappeared in mine, no longer bound to the chair, fully loaded and pointed at him.
Tell me, what do you do when someone threatens you with a gun?
18. Blood
We stared at each other. I wondered when the people on the other side of the mirror would come running in the door, ready to pull me away, lock me up, and sedate and experiment on me. After all, that's what you did with mutants, right?
The door banged open briefly to admit a figure, but somehow I never pictured the person who would come in to be so… hairy. This was supposed to be a secret mutant base. I may not have known much about the military, but short-back-and-no-sides was a phrase I had heard associated with army hair cuts. Also, last time I checked, uniforms did exist—the questioner was wearing one—and they did not include animal fur.
So either secret mutant experimentation facilities had different standers, or this guy wasn't working for them.
Since the man sitting across from the table from me looked just as confused as I was feeling, I was guessing it was the second option.
Either way, the gun barrel had found a new target until I figured out who he was. My sweaty hands readjusted their grip on the weapon.
Bang.
Somehow in those few milliseconds between the bullet leaving the barrel and hitting the guy's head I managed to vanish the bullet in midair. That very was close.
Sadly, Hair Man did not see it as an accidental shooting, and took my pulling the trigger as a sign that I wanted to kill him. So he tried to kill me.
The other man ducked under the interrogation table while Hair Man leapt over it to try to get to me. I screeched—what would you do?—and ducked, trying to dodge, and the bullet reappeared.
One thing I had learned early on with my power, things kept their inertia while they were under the influence of my power. For instance, if I dropped a tennis ball and moved it while it was still falling, it would keep going down at the same speed it had been. If I moved a bullet, well. You can imagine.
The previously spotless walls weren't white anymore; head wounds—especially fatal head wounds bleed a lot.
Hair Man was draped over the table mid-leap, while the other guy was huddled under it. Red liquid dripped down onto the floor. Some of the spatters had hit the walls, the mirror, the liquid on the floor was in puddles. Dead, definitely dead. Last time I checked most people couldn't survive with a hole in their forehead. Or with most of their blood pooling on the ground.
He was dead. And I had killed him.
So much for my plan to escape quietly.
19. Decisions
I stepped out of the door of the interrogation room into chaos. Obviously whoever had made the walls soundproof had done an excellent job in order for me not to have heard what was happening in the hall outside. Sirens were blaring earsplitting warnings. Evacuate. Why?
A rumbling shudder ran through the floor answering my question. No one wanted to be inside if the building fell to pieces. Wait. An earthquake? In Kansas? Maybe I wasn't a seismologist—I had yet to finish high school—but something told me that the ground in the Midwest wasn't supposed to shake.
So, either I wasn't in Kansas anymore and had been knocked out longer than I thought (unlikely but possible; they had stolen my watch), whoever built this place was an idiot that designed buildings that spontaneously collapsed (very unlikely), or something was causing the earthquake that wasn't really an earthquake.
Whatever was happening, staying inside didn't seem very safe.
You know those green exit signs that most public buildings have to show people how to get out? Turns out top secret experimentation facilities don't have those. And sneaking around when a bunch of soldiers run through the halls every fifteen seconds is not as easy as it sounds. However, assuming the soldiers were evacuating, they did unintentionally provide directions to the outside.
But no, my life isn't that simple; after a few minutes following, I could tell that the soldiers weren't headed outside, but farther into the building.
So… get lost trying to find the way out and have the place collapse, or follow the nice people as the go to somewhere obviously important? Decisions, decisions.
Easy to make decisions, but decisions none the less.
I followed them down three flights of stairs through multiple hallways and past closed doors too numerous to count. Wherever we were, the shaking wasn't as bad, so hopefully I was safe from death by entombment under hundreds of tons of building.
Suddenly, the group stopped in front of a door. I quickly ducked into a conveniently placed alcove just out of sight and peeked around the corner. Lots of hand signals were exchanged, most of which I did not understand.
My confusion was cleared up when people started pointing guns in my direction for the second time in the last hour. What do you do when multiple people, most likely well trained in hand to hand combat aim their weapons at you?
Decisions, decisions. I froze. They fired.
The world stood still for a split second. A funny thing about my power is that things don't always loose the kinetic energy while being transported. Maybe only one in ten keeps going at the same rate it started out at, but I had been shot at a lot in the last few days. In simple terms: bang, bullet disappears from gun barrel and reappears—still going the same speed—behind the person's skull.
20. Look
The dead bodies were staring at me as I stared back. In the movies, someone—usually a relative or best friend—always closes the person's eyes, but this wasn't the movies. I wasn't an actor, no one would suddenly say "cut!" while the people lying on the floor magically returned to life, sprung up onto their feet, and wiped the ketchup off of their faces.
This was real life, and the lifeless eyes were still open and looking at me.
I should be sad. I should be feeling guilty about what I did and not sleep well for weeks. I should at least have the decency not to steal a bullet proof vest off one of the smaller and less bloody bodies.
But I needed it. When I vanished bullets, it was more like a wall where anything that touched it disappeared; I wasn't the kind of mutant that was fast enough to pick out individual pellets going faster than the eye could see. I could be shot, and bleed, and die. Just like the soldiers who were staring at me from the ground.
Only with me, no one would care—except the person whose floor I just got red liquid all over, that is.
I really should feel sorry. Shouldn't I?
But everyone had to die sometime, and in a choice between me and them, I chose me.
The walkie-talkie one of the dead men had started crackling and spitting out static with a few words interspersed between the white noise. Mutant, metal, evacuate, eliminate, test subject, aaaaarrrrrrrggghhhhh. That last one was a kind of gurgling croak. I can only guess what happened on the other end. Pieced together—minus the groan—a metal mutant was evacuating and eliminating the test subject. Or they were supposed to eliminate the mutant and the test subject while evacuating the metal. Or evacuate while the metal test subject eliminated the mutant.
Or I should just leave and hope everyone left me alone after this, but I wanted to see what was behind the door.
Door? What door? Door number one, of course. The metal plated entrance to an unknown room or hallway that the soldiers had stopped in front of before trying to shoot me. It looked interesting, and I didn't feel like trying to find the metal mutant test subject who was eliminating the evacuators.
I grabbed the walkie-talkie and stepped between—never step on one, it's disrespectful, even if they were looking at you weirdly—the bodies to get to the door, which opened before I could reach for the handle.