A/N: Sorry about the delay. This is a rather short chapter, the next one will be longer.
Chapter Two - Fight, Forest, Fight!
"Good God, you think you could pick up the pace a bit?" Nord stood on top of a rock wall with his arms crossed, glaring at Digit who was struggling across a jumping course.
"Hey! Where in the word 'technopath' do you see 'athlete'?" She stumbled off the last post onto the ledge at the end. Zeke, next in line, deftly leaped from post to post, clearing the thirty-foot course in a few seconds. Colonel Votigan applauded.
"Zeke, get down ta the lab. I think there might be s'more about yer mutation we don' yet know. That t'weren't a normal time fer that course." Zeke obediently hopped down from the ledge and out the door. Nord, now the only one left on the ledge, grumbled something about 'that show-off brat,' and proceeded in his attempt to outdo Zeke. He deftly jumped into the first post, falling with a loud soft rustle to the pads below. The others broke into laughter. Nord pulled himself from the pads angrily, giving Digit on the ledge a nasty stare. A bee in the room stung the side of Digit's neck, falling dead to the floor. She shrieked and slipped off the ledge, landing near Nord in the foam pads.
Votigan blew his whistle.
"Yer all gonna hafta learn t' get along if we want this ta work! Now, that's enough fer t'day. Everyone head back ta yer rooms and cool off." He blew the whistle again, dismissing Digit and Nord.
Meantime, on the firing range, Kelsey sat behind the scope of a high-powered rifle. Physically, she was not apt for close combat, so they had mutually decided that sniping might be a more efficient venue. At the sound of a buzzer, she fired four rapid shots at targets scattered throughout the room. She was a natural shot, and three of the four hit near the centers of their targets without aiming. Another buzzer, four more shots, this time only two came in acceptable range. She checked her clip, as she had been instructed, and loaded a few more bullets in. She had just clicked the last round into place when the buzzer sounded, pressing her to fire with even less preparation than normal. When only one shot hit the appropriate range, her instructor turned to berate her.
"The enemy isn't going to sit and wait for you to line up the perfect shot. You have to learn to aim in the time it takes you to pull the trigger."
"That's impossible!" Kelsey protested. A buzzer sounded. She glared at it, not bothering to shoot this time.
"Your teammates, including your brother, will be relying on you to assist them in battle. Will you be so quick to let them down?" Kelsey sighed. As she lifted her rifle again, the door slid open behind her. Zeke, looking very proud of himself, strutted in.
"Hey sis, guess what?" The instructor gave him a look and opened his mouth to admonish him for the interruption. Kelsey's eyes flashed a little as she looked at him.
"He's allowed to be here." She said softly. Her words echoed through the range, as though someone had turned the volume of a whisper to the maximum. The instructor nodded in agreement and went to assist one of the other trainees. "Now, what were you saying Zeke?"
"It turns out I have 'above human reflexes.' The doctor guy said it was part of my mutation. They're putting me through some sort of reflex test tomo…" Zeke stopped suddenly, his eyes darting to the east wall.
"Zeke, what's coming?"
"Something bad."
The mood of relaxed preparation had been ripped away in favor of an indescribable panic. Zeke was right, something was coming. Guards with automatic weapons took positions at the gates of the compound, scanning the woods just outside for the intruder. A blur shot in past them, throwing two guards to the ground. The guards turned inward to face this invisible threat, only to be driven to the dirt by a second force.
As one of the guards, miraculously still alive and conscious, turned toward the forest again, a tree pulled its impossibly stretched branches back away from the defeated guards. He fired a burst of hot lead, shattering the bark of one of the branches but accomplishing little else. The branch whipped around, cutting several inches of flesh from the hapless man's neck. With a gurgle of blood and one more burst of uncontrolled gunfire, he dropped lifelessly to the ground.
The woman responsible for this mayhem, tall and silver-haired, stepped out from behind the tree. Through the silence came her rasping voice, calling out to the residents of the base.
"VOTIGAN! Get your cowardly self out here and face me!" What this hag wanted with the Colonel none of them knew, but the remaining guards inside the walls were not about to hand him over. They moved into position and opened fire, spraying hundreds of bullets in her general direction. The grass before her clustered together and rose, cushioning the bullets and leaving a patch of bare dirt in its wake. Votigan stepped to the gate.
"Who're you?" He barked.
"The mother of a young boy you ripped away." Votigan stopped for a moment. She couldn't be talking about the new boy, Zeke, his mother had been killed a few days before and besides, he wasn't the one who had handled that case. He scoured his memory, but of the dozens of boys he had taken he couldn't remember any with a psychotic mutant mother.
"Uh… ye wanna gimme a name 'ere?" The woman shrieked with frustration.
"Have you kidnapped so many that you can't remember my William? WHERE IS HE?" Votigan remembered now. William Towers, an insignificant case. The intel had been wrong, the boy wasn't a class one mutant, he was a class four and of no use to anyone. However, his mothers' appearance now explained the mystery.
"Ah. Ye must've been th' reason fer the mutant sightin's. Ma'am, we're jus' tryin to help the boy. He's a danger ta hisself and everyone-" A branch smashed him across the head, knocking him out. The woman shrieked again. The trees' roots tore from the ground and acted as impromptu legs, carrying the behemoths through the unhampering fence. A young woman with steel-grey skin dive bombed out of one of the trees, crushing a pair of soldiers into a small crater. As the few remaining gunmen tried to line up a shot on something, Reynolds led the five mutants out the doors of their training hall.
"Alright, it looks like you've got a nice first mission. I have no idea what the hell is going on here. Figure that out and solve the problem. Go!" The five sprang immediately into action. Zeke, though blind, was aware of three threatening mutants in the facility. Two were obvious to all, but one was moving too fast between doomed guards to be seen. He sensed it coming toward him, stepped to the side and held out a stick that had been torn from a nearby branch. Who or whatever it was, it crashed against the stick to quickly to stop, but was clearly disheartened as Zeke felt the thing leave the area quite rapidly.
The ignition point of most woods is around 575* Fahrenheit. Flashpoint knew this by heart, and chanted the number as she focused on one of the rampant trees.
"Five seventy five. Five seventy five. Five seventy five. Five seventy five." After a few moments, the tree began to crack and soften, until finally a tiny orange fire started on the bark of the tree. In seconds, the tree was engulfed. What Janet forgot was that this wasn't going to instantly bring down the tree. And right now, the tree was still stomping through the base, only now it was on fire.
Luckily, Digit had just set up a small auto turret she had found in the reflex course. At her pathological provocation, it began to rapidly target critical points on the flaming tree, weakening the already cracked wood.
A bear ran into it at full speed, snapping through the brittle, flaming wood and twisting the tree out of its master's control. Weakened, fragile and flaming, it finally toppled, crushing a large portion of the barracks. Nord patted it on the head, and it went for the strange grey woman who was crushing anything in her path. She climbed to the top of a building, unconcerned by the bear's attempt to follow her, and dropped off, turning the bear into a very runny stew.
Kelsey was already taking her position in a guard tower at the corner of the base. As the others were swatted away by plants, she lined up a shot on the strange old woman.
*PAFF*
A TPN dart embedded itself in the woman's chest. The plants around her fell limp, and her remaining tree skipped forward and fell on the training building. With a loud crash and a layer of smoke, her influence on the battle was finished.
"Bombshell! We need to get out of here!" The grey woman turned to see the old woman retreating into the forest. It was too late for an escape of her own, however, as the four mutants were closing on her quickly. With a resigned sigh, she put her hands up in surrender. Reynolds, brushing dust from his uniform, surveyed the scene with a sigh.
"Well, so much for the hope that you might cause LESS collateral damage."
A/N: I lied when I said I'd make this longer. I've decided it'll be much easier to make short chapters more frequently, so expect 1000-2000 word chapters on a bi-weekly to weekly basis. I'm not setting a schedule, because I'll just violate it. Anyway, enjoy chapter 3, and as usual all criticism is welcomed. EDIT: Merged with Chapter 2.
A convoy of military vehicles rattled down a cliff-side road. After the fiasco at the MIA training facility, everyone was a little on edge. The base had been blasted to ruins by the crazy old hag with her trees, not to mention the assistance she received from her appropriately named comrade, Bombshell.
Bombshell herself was chained to the inside of a huge, heavily armored APC. With her, though not restrained, were the five mutants who had been responsible for her capture, as well as their commanding officer Major Reynolds. It was he who broke the monotonous quasi-silence of the truck wheels.
"I just got off the phone with the Secretary of Mutant Affairs. With the loss of our training facility, we have very little choice but to assign you to active duty at the MIA Forward Operations Base outside Atlanta, Georgia."
"What about the rest of our training?" Zeke asked.
"You've had all of the important training you need, anything else you can learn as you go along. And besides, if you get into any situations that are too hot to handle, I daresay you'll see them coming. You're practically an alarm system." Reynolds chuckled, and dropped his eyes to a notebook in his hand.
"Wait, you said this base is outside of Atlanta?" Digit snorted. "Is it really wise to put these things outside of major metropolitan areas?"
"I'm not in charge of the construction of bases. Besides, it assists logistics. It's a lot easier to get you folks to a foreign country quickly when we have Atlanta International Airport to ship you out of. Any of you know a nine letter word for 'facist or overly-strict?'"
"Government." Nord chimed.
"That's ten letters, moron." Digit grumbled.
"Alright then, 'Reynolds.'"
"That's eight. Have you ever even been inside a school? The word's 'draconian,' Major." Digit sat back, and silence took the van until their arrival at the Denver airport. As they climbed out of the truck, Kelsey looked back at Bombshell.
"Please tell me we're not taking her on a commercial airline."
"Of course not. None of you are flying commercial today, we have a specialized plane waiting on the runway already." Reynolds led them through an empty terminal and out onto the tarmac. As they boarded a mid-sized cargo plane emblazoned with 'MIA,' Zeke shuddered.
"I don't think it's a good idea to get on that plane." He stopped short of the ramp, refusing to board.
"What's wrong? You think something's going to hit it?" Even as Reynolds finished his question, Bombshell, already aboard the plane, cut her foot loose just enough to stomp. The plane's floor crumpled, tearing a hole in the fuselage and breaking the chains that held the grey-skinned woman. She threw herself against the side of the plane, blasting it to scrap, and punched her two guards across the tarmac.
"Boy, you really are an alarm." Reynolds pulled his side-arm, loading it quickly with TPN darts. As Bombshell rocketed toward him, he took aim and fired four shots at her neck and chest. They bounced off harmlessly. Zeke bowled the Major out of Bombshell's path as Flashpoint began to heat the prisoner's metal skin. Within seconds Bombshell was writhing in agony, feeling horrible burns through her steel exterior.
"We can't risk taking her on the plane, she's too dangerous. Finish her off, Flashpoint, I'll handle the paperwork." Reynolds stood by Flashpoint as she continued to turn up the heat.
"What? You can't do that!" Kelsey looked at the agonized figure on the ground, then glared at Flashpoint. Her voice began to echo. "STOP IT. Let her go!" Flashpoint dropper her gaze, and the woman slowly regained lucidity. Reynolds and Flashpoint both stood, unmoving, as their prisoner escaped through the airport fence. After she had gone, Kelsey dropped her gaze.
"What the FUCK did you do that for?" Reynolds stood over Kelsey, furious. "She was DANGEROUS. She was a criminal! And you just let her get away!"
"It's not right to kill her just because you can't contain her! Kelsey's right!" Digit stepped to Kelsey's side, followed by Zeke. Reynolds looked to Nord for his opinion.
"Hey, don't look at me. I don't give a shit what you do to these psychos, so long as you don't ask me to help." Reynolds sighed, throwing his hands up in the air with resignation.
"Fine. We'll round her up later. I don't expect you to circumvent my orders again." They waited around the tarmac for an hour or two as a new plane was fueled and prepared. They boarded in silence, with Flashpoint and Reynolds sitting as far away from the others as possible.
They touched down at the Atlanta runway just before dusk. It was raining lightly, giving the asphalt a slick sheen and contributing another layer of grey to the already dreary atmosphere. They got onboard another truck that had been sent to pick them up and set out of the city to a heavily guarded military base a few miles west of the metro area. Upon arrival, they were greeted by a tall, proper, bespectacled man with a nametag that read 'Agent Duqarias, Head of MIA.'
"Welcome to the base. I was informed of the incident on the Denver runway, but rest assured I am not holding anyone here responsible. If you'd come inside, I'd like to debrief you myself.
Seated around a large conference table, they quickly explained the specifics of the attack on the training facility, as well as the mishap at departure. Duqarias smiled, pulling down a projector screen.
"What is it with you people and slide shows?" Nord grumbled. Duqarias ignored him.
"I feel I should give you the details on the woman who attacked you. It's only fair, you may encounter her again. Her name is Fuchsia Towers. Her son, William Towers, was selected for study several years back after an incident at a farmer's market in his home town. William turned out to be a class four mutant who's only ability was to excrete some sort of pollen that did nothing. Incidentally, he was allergic to it, the only way we could keep him alive was to put him on a respirator. Anyway, as we discovered earlier today, it was his mother who was the threat. As you are no doubt aware, she controls plants." Nord broke in.
"No shit, Sherlock. Why don't you just give the hag her kid back and save us all a huge headache?"
"Because, we don't actually have her son anymore. He went missing a few months back after a gas explosion at our medical facility, he's presumed to have been among the dead."
"Remind me not to invest in real estate with you guys." Digit mumbled.
"The point is, we're incapable of appeasing this woman's demands, so if you encounter her again you should make every attempt to bring her into custody. Dead or alive." Duqarias shut the slide show down and folded up the screen. "We're going to give you a day to get acclimated to the base, your first mission will be Thursday at 0900. Dismissed."