A/N- I'm getting mad at my radio. I DO NOT CARE ABOUT CAR INSURANCE CHEAP!
Anyway.
I stole Rissa from XxBlackEaglexX. Don't tell.
Rissa- I'm tied up in her basement! Save me!
Me- See? I'm so bad.
Voice in the Background- Hey, who's down there?
Me- Oh noes, it's her! Rissa, hide!
Rissa- HELP ME!
Me- meanie.
DMSICALEIR- We do not own the Maximum Ride characters. We do own the wonderful OC's that are Rissa, Gina, and Ashen. NO TOUCHEY!
Chapter Nine
written by MissMusic17
"Well..." said Rissa, procrastinating.
I was terrified. This was it. Make it or break it. I gave Rissa a little nod. We had to do this sooner or later.
Her eyes flashed, sympathetic. They sent me a clear message: I'm sorry.
"We never met because we were in a different wing of the school altogether. We were created before you, and the whitecoats considered us failures, because we weren't the mindless army they wanted. You are an 'improved' version of us." began Rissa. "They were already experimenting with Erasers by then. It took a while for them to get it 'right'"
She paused, giving me a questioning look. I curled into Ashen, trying to be invisible. His warmth helped me calm down a little bit.
I nodded again. I was glad she gave me a second chance to say no. Rissa really understood me.
She started up again. "There was four of us. I had a little brother named Hex. He was about a year younger than me." I saw her eyes tear up. Poor Rissa. She had loved him so much. "He could almost hex people. That's where he got his name from. His talent was kind of erratic; he wasn't very good at controlling it. But he'd almost….curse people. Give them bad luck." She gave a small, sad smile, probably thinking of the jokes Hex would play on us.
"Ashen was supposed to be all-powerful. He is, in a way, but he would never use his power against anybody unless he had to. The whitecoats considered it a malfunction. I was meant to be a weapon, cutting off feeling from people as we killed them. Like Ashen, I wouldn't do it. I healed the four of us after the experiments, easing the pain."
"And Gina..."
I braced myself. Ashen squeezed me close. I was all but melded into him.
"Gina was an early version of the Erasers."
It was worse than I thought it would be. A lot worse.
Fang scowled. Iggy started swearing again, and Angel looked scared, hugging Gazzy. Nudge was tense and afraid. Max was yelling and cursing. Then, they all lunged at me.
Within a second, I had six horrified, angry, and scared bird-kids leaping toward me, about to kill me.
I tensed up, preparing myself to fight them.
Then they slammed into an invisible barrier. I peeked at Ashen's eyes. Yep. They had gone from sky blue to a flat black. You couldn't even see the pupils anymore.
Praise the Lord. Ashen had just saved me.
He spoke in a flat, no-nonsense tone.
"She's not going to hurt you."
Well, that confused them. They were still ready to pounce on me though, right next to the barrier, waiting for it to show a weakness.
"Rissa, maybe you could explain a bit more." Ashen was at his scariest.
She took a deep breath. "Gina was on of the first Eraser 'prototypes'" she actually did air quotes. Rissa was able to cheer me up a bit, even in this situation. "They thought she was a failure, because she doesn't have that trademark Eraser bloodthirst. As you've seen by now, she doesn't have the overwhelming urge to kill." Rissa flashed me a small smile. She was good. I was getting less and less afraid every second.
"She's completely different. She can go all wolf. Not just wolfish. Gina sort of… shape shifts. You can almost mistake her for a real animal. Except the fur. She's silvery, like the silver in her wings." I unfolded them a bit as an example. "She doesn't have wings as a wolf. We don't know why."
"The whitecoats tried to train the bloodthirst into her. One day, when we were 8 and Hex was 7, the whitecoats decided to get rid of us. They put us in a gym-ish experimenting room and sent Gina on us, trying to kill two birds with one stone. We die, Gina gets vicious. Win-win."
She clenched her fists, remembering that day. "As I said, Gina is actually pretty nice. She never fights unless it's to save somebody's life. She waited until the whitecoats closed the door, then showed us a weak point in the window frame she had discovered a few months earlier. We were able to all escape together."
"We found this cabin about a year later. There was three of them. Two years ago, I got in a fight with Hex. I don't even remember what it was about. My last words to him were 'Get the out of here, and never come back!' he told me 'I hate you, so, maybe I will.'" She began to cry. I got up, and went to hug her. I knew that Rissa was stuck in limbo. She didn't want to remember, but she didn't want to forget, either. Rissa plowed on. "He didn't come back. Hex went to one of the other cabins to sleep. That night, though, there was a terrible thunderstorm. Lightning hit a tree, and it fell on the cabin. We weren't even able to find the body in the wreckage."
She broke into full-out tears. Ashen and I held her as she cried, and eventually the other flock filed out and went to bed.
