I know this chapter is short, the next one will longer, I promise.
Also, review it for me, tell me what you think is working, what isn't working, and even what you want to work. This is a work in progress, after all.
Since her encounter with the Rat King, Phoenix had not had any dealings with any of the Grey Cats. She couldn't really say that she missed it, but she missed the company, the doing something to help someone, and, if she was completely honest, the feeling of begrudging and almost superstitious respect she received.
She could definitely see how easy it was for power to go to one's head.
So she was quite surprised when members began visiting her home again for their injuries. They still had no one who could deal with anything more than a cut, and if something got infected, they were at a complete loss. If the mutant was an insect, he or she was just out of luck.
Most of the mutants who came to her were reptiles or insects, something whose body worked differently enough from a human that they couldn't figure out how to heal themselves. A few birds came to her, too, but they were a rare sort of mutant anyway.
Each person who came in always asked how she was doing, if she needed anything, and that Chategris had always respected her medical expertise. Had she not been his Medicienne long before she was the Phoenix? He had regaled the story of how he'd come to the Haunted Warehouse, with the human woman who took care of four little mutants, and who healed the homeless and the lost. How she had done what no other person he knew or had known could do. She healed hurts on all kinds of mutants, and asked nothing in return. How she had healed Toaster with her tears alone. Apparently it was now known to all of what was left of the Grey Cats.
The Phoenix knew what all of this was—Chategris' attempt to apologize without having to say he was sorry. She wasn't ready to forgive him yet.
A witchdoctor! Her heart rate would increase at the thought of it. How insulting! To think in your mind I'm a witchdoctor is bad enough, to say it to my face is…
…was something he needed to suffer for a little longer before he was forgiven.
"Chategris knows he is always welcome here," she would tell her patients when they spoke to her of him.
Let him brave the ghosts of my warehouse. Then, maybe, I will forgive him, she thought.
OoOoOo
Phoenix had her head down on her arm, engaging in her favorite activities, writing. Her pencil flew across the paper, her eyes barely seeing what she was writing due to the angle of her on her arm on the table. It came to her faster than she could write it, and she was lost in the words and movement of her pencil. She wrote about the deep voice she was looking for that seemed to sing with the drip of the sewers and how she liked the sound of it. She wrote about Arcos, and smelling, and playing.
She was brought back to reality by a "zzzzzttt!"
She sat up and looked around at what might be the cause the sound. She didn't see anything.
All three of the kids were in the workshop on the floor below. She could hear their muffled talking, and sounds of bangs and mechanical tools whirring. None of those sounds matched the one she just heard.
She heard it again, and saw a flicker of light from the side of her eye, coming from the bookcase. The ball that Razz had found, that was now resting on the bowl at the end of the shelf, began to glow. Above it a picture appeared.
It was a picture of a warehouse. She recognized it, it was near the docks, one of the warehouses used for the immediate unloading of the ships until their big rigs arrived. The picture slowly descended into the actual warehouse, zooming in until it was in one room, where a sickening-pink light began to blink. It stayed in this position for a moment or two, and then the ball went dead.
She sat staring at the spot where the graphic had shown, like a hologram right in her living room. For some reason, it didn't seem possible, but her mind chided her. Anything in your life is possible, girlfriend.
"Kids!" she called down the stairs. "We're going Kraang hunting tonight!"
Kraang hunting was usually a more involved endeavor than it was this night. Usually they had to search for their destination, wait for a good time to go in, and attack immediately.
Tonight the four of them waited in the rafters of the warehouse that Phoenix had seen projecting from the Kraang ball. The warehouse itself was completely empty, devoid of anything other than them and the varmints that may have called the corners and dark spaces home.
"I don't like waiting," Aries whispered.
"No one likes waiting," Phoenix answered.
Aries opened his mouth to say something else, when a tiny pink triangle appeared in the middle of the air below them. It grew, until it was door sized. For a moment, nothing happened, and then Kraangdroids began to march out of it, four by four. Looking at it from above, it was very disconcerting to see one side of the triangle shining its sickening-pink light onto the empty wall of the warehouse, and then see the other side of the warehouse begin to fill with Kraang.
After a good deal of Kraang robots came through the triangle, another Kraang came through, only this one rode a different robot. It reminded Phoenix of the spaceship-riding Kraang, only this spaceship had legs, and was walking like a great, giant spider. Two more followed it, pulling something behind them. The metallic ropes were taut, and the robot who had entered before them turned and began directing traffic in a strange, twittery language. Something large began to emerge from the triangle, metal and round, with what looked like a gun poking out.
"That doesn't look good," Arcos muttered.
"We need to close that door," Phoenix said. "Or at least keep anything else from coming through it."
"How do we do that?" Medusa whispered.
"I haven't any idea," Phoenix replied.
"Guess we just do it the old fashioned way, then," Aries said, bringing his ax behind him and jumping down from the rafters. Medusa and Arcos followed him in the thick of things, and Phoenix pulled out her slingshot as cover support.
Six of the robots were incapacitated in moments, before laser fire even began firing. Phoenix pelted brains with her slingshot. While she hit a robot almost every time, she had trouble getting the brains in the middle. Most had their backs to her, so she decided to concentrate on the spaceship-with-legs.
Arcos, Aries, and Medusa were having no problems at all with the Kraang robots that they were fighting. Body parts when flying, pink goo that had once belonged inside of Kraang splattered about the warehouse. They seemed unable to decide what to do in a coordinated attack. They simply fought whichever mutant was closest to them.
While they were not much larger than their floating counterparts, the legged-spaceship Kraang seemed to have more…hands, for lack of a better word. She shot at them, and they stopped pulling in the strange weapon that was only partially through the portal. Then all three of them turned toward her, and their legs extended so they were eyelevel with her in the rafters.
"Oh dear," she mumbled.
One of them shot at her, and she jumped out the way just as the metal beam she sat on ended up with a hole where she had been sitting.
"It is the ones known as The Children of the Phoenix," said a robotic voice. "The Children of the Phoenix must be eliminated."
Aries cried, "They know our name! Now we're never going to be able to change it!"
"Just get used to the name, Aries!" Phoenix screamed, jumping away from another laser fire. She jumped like a frog, from beam to beam as the three legged-spaceship riding Kraang shot at her.
An ominous creek echoed through the warehouse.
"We need to get out of here," Arcos yelled. "The building has lost too much support."
Phoenix jumped, using a fallen beam as a slide from the ceiling to the floor, and then sprinted for the door after her children.
Shortly afterward, there was a crash, followed by an explosion. Then, the Children of the Phoenix were enfolded in dust, unable to see anything. The sound of sirens whined in the distance. The dust lingered long enough for them to leave the area, once it had lightened and they could see their feet.
"What was that big thing they were bringing through that portal?" Medsua asked.
Arcos, Aries, and Phoenix shook their heads. "I don't know," they all said at the same time.
"It didn't look like anything good," Aries said.
"It looked like it had a gun on it," Arcos commented.
Phoneix nodded. "Kurtzman said they were recovering from the explosion at the TCRI building," she said. "It looks like the recovery is complete to me."