Chapter 10
Alika
She padded up to the rest of the group after finally getting back to it. She had felt strangely at ease around Rahne, and she knew the girl was feral. Coming back,though, she didn't see Rahne anywhere. Only a wolf that she knew should not be so calm around people.
'Hello. You a shapeshifter too?'
The wolf gave a little start as Ally spoke to her. Turning, Ally confirmed her suspicion of it being Rahne. Her eyes stayed the same.
'Yeah! How'd you do that?'
'Part of my gift is talking to animals.'
'Oh, that's cool.' She gave a happy little yip and padded towards her. Rahne was bigger than Ally, and Ally was painfully aware of it. Beta saw her and gave an excited shriek and picked her up.
"Beta put me down! Now." Beta just giggled and hugged her closer.
"Ally, this is the best birthday present ever! You finally showed me your secret power!"
Yeah, Bets. I went through a painful transformation, just for your birthday. That's what Ally wanted to say, but she decided that it would be okay for her naive sister think that it was for her for the moment. So instead she said, "Yeah, Wolvie and Cougy already gave you theirs, so I decided to might as give you yours today. Now put me down! Yer gonna kill me!"
"Nuh uh. Yer fuzzy and soft, and really light."
"Ooh, can I hold her!" Jubilee shrieked. Ally protested, but Bet nodded and passed her over. Soon all of the girls had taken a turn in holding her, even Storm. Finally Derek grabbed her, saving her from their cooing at her.
"Hey, you are really soft!"
"Put me down, Derek!"
"Are ya still mad at me?"
"Yes, now put me down!"
"Nope. Not until ya aren't mad at me."
She dug her claws into him and he yelped and dropped her. Her claws were made out of adamantium, after all. She landed awkwardly in the mud, the sticky stuff coating her pelt. "EWWW. You got mud all over me!"
Logan saw her and wrinkled his nose. "Jeez, kid, ya smell like wet dog, and yer filthy!"
"Not my fault, Derek dropped me!"
"Was too yer fault, ya scratched me."
"Was not, you wouldn't put me down!"
Beta came running over and said, "Ally! Jubilee said that we should give ya a bath, because now you're all dirty, and while we're giving ya a bath, ya can tell us about what happened in New Orleans!"
Ally tried to protest, but they all gave her puppy dog eyes, so she gave in. Ha, here she was, in canine form, and they were giving her puppy dog eyes. The girls found a hose and turned it on. Victor had old them that she was not allowed in the house while she was muddy. After she was clean, she began to tell them about New Orleans.
"Okay, so, New Orleans. Right. Okay. So, um…" Ally was having trouble where to start, finally just beginning. "Eight years ago, I lived in New Orleans with my mother. I didn't have my powers yet, well, I had the feral senses, and healing, but that is it. I… looked different. I had blond hair, and it was curly, like Beta's hair. My eyes weren't two colors."
"What color were they?"
"They were green. Almost forest green in fact. My name was different, it was Angel Jamie Howlett, named after her. Mom changed my name when we left. The day we left started out normal enough. I was in third grade, an-"
"Wait, you were in third grade?"
"I've already graduated college. I skipped pre-k, kindergarten, first, second, fourth... They called me a child prodigy, but really? I just got REALLY bored in my classes and so I kind of just skipped ahead in my classes, did a lot of them in the summer and during winter breaks. My mom MADE me go through middle school and now high school. You kind of need a high school education if you want a job, so I am going to start my freshman year this fall. Anyways, I was getting bullied, because I was four and in third grade, and apparently that made me weird. The bully pushed me down, and my arm got really badly scraped up, and the bully saw it heal. Mutant hysteria was at an all time high in Orleans, especially in my neighborhood. He rounded up his friends, his parents, his friends parents, their friends, basically everyone and their sister.
"They didn't come until after school, with guns, rocks, pitchforks, knives, and fire. They blocked off the doors and set the house on fire, with Mom and me still in it. That is when I started panicking. My skeleton felt like it was on fire, then I realized that I wasn't on fire. My body began to change, and that was the first time that I became this. I managed to get me and mom out, but everything we had was burned along with the house. All of our pictures, the Christmas tree, my first sword. Everything was gone, just like that.
"We moved to Canada, and Mom changed my name to Alika Jamie Logan. We lived there until she died. Well, you did. I lived at Hellfire Academy a while before she died. But in New Orleans was the worst thing that ever happened to me. My hair lost its curls, it turned black and gold, and my eyes changed to two colors. My other powers came in with the nightmares from that night. They only got worst when they took me."
"Ah'm sorry, but why is that more traumatic than what happened when they took ya?" Rouge asked logically.
"Because a boy's heart stopped twice on his way to the hospital, he may never wake up, and even if he does, he'll never look the same. I made a kid's future hell. His face is so scared that had he died, they would have had to use dental records to identify him." The girls were silent once more.
"Who was the boy?" Rouge finally asked.
"The bully. His name was Matthew Stilks."
Beta looked at her and said, "So your name is really Angel? Can we call you that? Huh, Ally, can we?" She changed the subject away from painful memories in a way only children could.
"Beta, I've gone by Ally for a long time. I've always been Ally to you. Besides, it reminds me of too many memories. Memories of before I was feared for being different. Of before I found out about my baby sister, one of the only good things to happen in my life."
"Hey Al, why don't you change back?"
"I'm too tired right now. Takes a lot of energy to do it, and this is only the fifth time I've changed."
"Oh."
Ally yawned widely, proving her point. She was exhausted, and she hated being in this form. She was pretty weak in it. If she wanted out of it, she would need to get a lot of sleep and eat a lot to get enough energy built up to change back. In the mean time, she would just have to deal with getting coddled and held by Logan's adopted daughters, Beta, and Derek. If they could catch her, that is.
Ally made an impressive leap onto Derek's head, and the door to her uncle's mansion. Unfortunately, the door was firmly shut. Ally hissed in annoyance. Now how was she supposed to get in at? She looked up and examined the exterior of the building. Spotting a partially open window, she then searched for a way to get to it.
Mapping out the path in her head, she leaped from one small outcropping of the house to another. She was about to enter the window, but she decided that maybe it would be best to search for one that was completely open. She groaned as she saw one. At the very top floor. As in, attic space. She hated attics, they were all dusty and full of old stuff that was worthless. If only that weren't the only fully opened window.
She climbed up and through the window, looking back to see them all searching for her, as she had disappeared when they were focused on Derek's complaining. She gave a mischievous chuckle and leaped down onto the dusty ground. She sneezed at all of the dust, continuing to walk around, if only to get to the other side of the attic. As far as she could see, the room was completely empty, except for a piano in the corner of the space. How someone had managed to get an attic up here when she couldn't even find the door was a mystery to her.
Ally wasn't paying attention to where she was going and failed to see the thin wire that ran across the floor. As she fell over, the thing holding open the window was moved and the window slammed down. Ally froze before getting up, making sure she didn't trigger anymore wires and traps. As though someone had flicked a switch, she could see dozens of thin wires stretching across the room. Had she not been in this form, she never would have made it this far without triggering the wires. Then again, she never would have come here in the first place, either, but that wasn't the point.
Ally stalked across the room, ducking and weaving through the wires, careful not to trip them and land her in a worse case than being trapped in a room where the only way out so far was the window. Unless… unless the piano was hiding a trapdoor to the floor below? Ally set her course for the piano. She finally got there, peeking carefully under the legs for a latch. She found it, indeed, along with a single wire that in turn was connected to other wires, and those connected to others, all up till they were all connected. You trigger that wire, you triggered them all, and that could kill you.
Of course, it could also open the window, but Ally didn't want to take that risk. She would rather tread carefully around the wires. Or maybe she could trigger one of them at a time. That might be the safest course of action. Deciding that she would trip them one at a time, she went back to the window, triggering one close to her head. When nothing happened, she slowly went on to the next one, then the next. So far, the ones she was she was tripping weren't doing anything. Maybe they all made the window close, making sure the wires got all the possible routes from the window further into the room. Eventually the wires started to trigger other things, on of which was a blast of freezing water, Ally barely avoiding that one, the blast only catching her paw as she stepped back.
She finally was left with only three wires. One being the one that was connected to the door. So far none of the wires had done anything really damaging, besides for a couple of old movie poison darts that came from the wall. Ally hadn't been hit by them, but it was a close call. Ally cut one of the three wires, breathing a sigh of relief as all that happened was a couple of flames coming from the wall. Now all that was left was thos last two wires. She snapped one, she snapped both. So, slowly but surely, standing on top of the trapdoor, she cut the wire.
With a surprisingly quiet band, the trap fell down from beneath the piano, protecting the trapdoor from any of the traps that would have hapened. Ally was glad that she had tripped the wires one by one, even if she was no caged on a trapdoor she could not open. All the traps together would have been deadly, even though on their own they were practically harmless.
"Who made this thing!" She muttered to herself. Who went through all the trouble to rig an attic that was almost imposible to get into, was empty, to kill someone! Ally knew that if she were going to get out, she was going to have to be human to do it.
A/N: Yes. Just a chapter that I made in my freetime. Sorry if it is a little bit choppy. Or a lot. Tell me what you think in the reviews, please.