Shake Your Foundations
13. Talking It Out
Andi decided to avoid the mounting tension with her boss and spent the first half of the following school day finding new ways to hide. When that human chick she met in the library found her between classes and asked if she wanted to sit with her at lunch, she accepted. Much as she hated the cafeteria food and the other idiots that tended to gather and eat there like a farmer's pigs at a trough, the boss rarely visited. She just had to fake being a 'real' girl for half an hour. And besides, the human girl seemed rather...not annoying.
"So you're the new girl?" a perky girl with her mousy brown hair in a ponytail asked when Jenna led her up to 'their' table.
She wouldn't have picked this one—damn bad view of the exits and too close to the football team and their lack of volume control—but the Brotherhood claimed the only good table in the room. Not worth the brawl over, plus the boss would probably kill her for doing something like that. "Yeah. Not staying long, though."
"Don't blame you; place has really gone downhill since Kelly took over." Perky Girl twirled her plastic fork aimlessly as she spoke.
"Kinda like Springwood after Freddy Krueger got through with it." Jenna joked, poking at her mashed potatoes. Perky Girl snickered.
"We'd be lucky if he showed up here," Perky Girl quipped. "Kelly liked to blame the 'gangs' for it all, but it really was him. The gangs were here and bickering when Darkholme was in charge, but there weren't any brawls on the lawn."
Probably because Mom terrified them into submission, Andi thought, but wisely avoided saying it out loud. "Lovely. Sorry, didn't catch your name? I'm Amy."
"I heard. I'm Stacy," Stacy introduced herself, a friendly smile on her face. "Don't waste your time on the meat products, by the way." Her smile inverted into a frown. "Veggies are safest around these parts."
"So I'd heard." Okay, so that sneer really was her, but it was justified. She was pretty sure the meatloaf was made of the brains of some bizarre otherworldly creature; it looked enough like some of the experiments in the science division for her to want nothing to do with it. Ick. "You'd think they'd spring for some chicken nuggets every once in a while, but no…"
"I know, right?" Stacy rolled her eyes. "I mean, yeah, rebuilding the football stands and part of the gym last year cost money…and so did re-doing the science lab after something trashed it…but the school district isn't broke enough to make lack of funds an excuse for poor cafeteria food."
"One of these days, they're going to give half the school food poisoning." Jenna groused into her mashed potatoes.
"Let 'em; at least when they screw up, you can sue the school board to get something done." Andi half-quipped. She remembered it being somewhere on Mom's list of things to do to the Bayville school board. Maybe she ought to put a bug in Zarana's ear about it? Zarana complained loud enough to wake the dead sometimes, so it ought to be enough to get the parents up in arms.
"Girl has a point." Stacy smiled in amusement. Jenna's jaw dropped.
"But! But what about student safety?" A shocked Jenna sputtered. "What you suggested is just horrible!"
"Oh, please! If the current administration really cared about that, they wouldn't feed us this garbage," Stacy scoffed, poking at her food. "Speaking of garbage, has the whole Jean Grey love quadrilateral resolved itself yet, or do I need to keep avoiding key players?"
"Might want to avoid Matthews anyway because he's a pig, but general interaction should be safe." Jenna shrugged. "It's the Brotherhood kids you have to watch for."
"True." Stacy nodded.
Andi didn't know what happened, and quite frankly, she didn't want to know badly enough to ask about it. "Noted. So, where's a girl to go for some fun in this town that doesn't involve retail therapy?" Yeah, she could go to the mall under the pretense of being 'normal', but it wasn't on her list of top priorities. Far too many places potentially hiding snipers and spooks. Plus, even if she could get Zarana to filch the boss's credit card, she so didn't want to see what he'd come up with as punishment for using it.
"Guessing the arcade's out for you with that bum arm…and so's the go-kart and mini-golf place." Jenna frowned. "Bowling, maybe?"
Andi shook her head. "Ribs took a beating and it still kinda hurts to move my good shoulder the wrong way. Sorry."
Jenna came up with an amendment for her suggestion. "Hey, we can play and you can just sit, watch, and eat nachos if you want. Bowling alley has some really good nachos. Not much else to do in town with your arm and shoulder in bad shape, I'm afraid. Sorry about that."
"Not your fault this town is a dump." Stacy waved it off. "There's not much to do besides go see a movie somewhere and neither of us are rich enough to do that all the time."
"There's that theater not far from here." Jenna remembered. "Their tickets aren't expensive."
Stacy shook her head. "Yeah, but none of the films playing this week seem good."
"I don't know, that upcoming Hyperion film seemed really good." Jenna smiled. She excitedly turned to Andi. "They're doing a whole cinematic universe! They're eventually going to do a whole Squadron Supreme film! I'm so excited."
"Okay..." Andi blinked. She wasn't really into that kind of thing.
"Yeah, but that won't be out or another couple of months." Stacy shook her head. "None of the movies out at that theater now look appealing."
"I understand." Andi nodded. She rarely got to do 'normal' kid things anyway. Money might not be an issue for Shadowatch anymore, but between Zartan's training assignments and their hectic filming schedule there just wasn't time for it. Not without a lot of pre-planning and some well thought out disguises to hide them from the press. "Not much to do but study for kids like me."
"You know, that might not be a bad idea." Jenna tapped her bottom lip with her right index finger, the rest of that hand supporting her chin. It looked like something Velma from those Scooby Doo flicks might do and was more adorable in person than it was on screen.
Wait. Adorable? What the hell…? "Care to share with the rest of the class?"
"Well, if we had a normal set-up, you'd be in AP classes, right?" Jenna asked. She nodded, not sure where this train of thought was rolling. "Which ones are your best?"
"English/Composition, literature, and foreign languages," she answered. "I'm okay at history, but barely passed algebra enough to take geometry this year. Why?"
"Think you could help me out, then?" Stacy asked, eyes widening a bit excitedly at the prospect. "I can read and talk just fine, but writing? So not my thing. And it only gets worse in Spanish. I know you might only be here another week or so, but I'd really appreciate it."
"And we could both tutor you in math, since you seem to have issues with it." A smiling Jenna added. "We can go to my house after school tomorrow to go over it. Well, if your dad doesn't mind." Andi pondered the question. Was that a good idea? Jenna and Stacy seemed harmless enough, and they didn't seem annoying. Also, she might get some help understanding math a bit more. And the boss did say she had to maintain the appearance of being a 'normal' girl... Okay. The disguised mutant thought. Andi shrugged.
"He should be fine with it." And even if he wasn't, Zarana would probably let her do it anyway.
Some teams might have paused their plans if their leader were out of commission, waiting for them to continue before resuming whatever schemes were currently in play. Conversely, others fell apart due to factions forming and conflicting in the power vacuum left by a strong leader's sudden departure. It formed the brutal, bloody truth behind why only four known mutant teams existed and their varying success rates.
Shadowatch neither fell apart nor paused their efforts to weed out the troublemakers in the Chicago Police Department. Chicago was a city built on corrupt politics, bribed officials, and bad police work, all of which made it very easy for the Dreadnok elite to gather enough evidence to force those "in charge" to do their jobs, be it through bribery or blackmail. It had been that way seemingly since even before the days of Prohibition and Al Capone. And unlike the Brotherhood or Acolytes, Shadowatch had a clear line of succession in the field and followed it. With how often their squad leader landed in the infirmary, they couldn't afford not to have it mapped out.
"Ooh, that's nasty," Kristen winced slightly at the image she was looking at on the computer screen. "Copy, paste, and stick it in an e-mail to his wife but don't send it yet. Save that for his rejection of our magnanimous offer," the dhampiric mutant ordered. She currently stood behind Virus' computer chair, pale eyes reading over the wealth of information regarding a certain state senator's love life. Oh, he hid it well, but not well enough to stop a technopath and hacker as skilled as Virus from unearthing it.
"Uhhhngh! That's it, I need a long shower and a vat of brain bleach," An exhausted Calvin groaned, the sound muffled by him dragging his hands across his face in a downward scrubbing motion. "I had no idea politics got that brutal."
"I would think Florida would be worse, but maybe it's just weirder," Mitch piped up as he leafed through some documents.
"Welcome to Chicago, where the mobsters are more legit than the cops," Corona quipped from her spot at the rec room coffee table, eyes never leaving a stack of documents. "We might not have invented the corrupt politicians and dirty cops, but we damn sure perfected the art of making them."
"Bad for the city, good for us," Bryan admitted. He had a group of photographs by one hand and a cold grape soda in the other. "Would've been better if Magneto weren't frikkin' crazy and decided to make our lives difficult…"
"If by 'better' you mean 'less challenging', than I suppose so." Kristen offered a dainty one-shouldered shrug to her teammate. "It's been kinda fun to have something to do besides smile for the camera."
"Really, though, for a man who wants to make the world better for mutants, he has absolutely no grasp of politics." Regan shook her head. "No bribes, no threats, no lobbyists…"
"Neither do the X-Men really, when you think about it..." Calvin remarked as he stretched his arms.
"He's only gone to half of Cobra Commander's 'How to take over the World' lectures and thus missed out on that lesson," Neal remarked. "'Destroy downtown New York with giant robots' definitely sounds like a Cobra special." The other members of Shadowatch snickered.
"Probably from Destro's department." Regan nodded. "He's got the brains to build a better giant robot from scratch than Trask managed from some oversized mothballed Stark-tech schematics. Speaking of which, we need to hold onto that one in case Stark Chicago's current chairman tries to pull something."
"True enough. Obadiah Stane definitely graduated from the Crimson Guard School of Ethics," Kristen quipped. A wicked grin formed on her face. "Damn, if we keep this up, we might be able to bribe the White House!"
"Maybe the Vice." Mitch shrugged. "He looks kinda seedy."
"And oily." Regan crinkled her nose in disgust. "He needs to shower more and campaign less."
"You're a vain little thing aren't you?" Heart-Wrencher asked, an amused smile on her face. She and Burn-Out were on the couch, supervising.
"One of us had to be." Regan lifted her chin into the air.
"Do we have time to start digging into the files from Bayville?" Corona asked. "Andi wanted those done ASAP to see who had infiltrated the school besides the usual suspects."
"I'll do it," A grumbling Virus raised his hand. "Think they can mess with MY woman, do they?" he continued grumbling at a volume too low for anyone but Kristen to overhear and she elected not to broadcast it. Something about building and death rays and God knows what else from that twisted Englishman's imagination...
Steve Garrett, Leathersuit, had kept rather to himself during this whole thing. Sure, he did help look through documents (contrary to what Virus believed, Leathersuit was not an idiot and was perfectly capable of reading), but he looked rather lost and worried. "...How much longer you reckon they'll be gone?" He finally asked.
"Hey, the crocodile speaks!" Corona joked. "Been pretty quiet lately."
"Worried about Andi, are you?" Regan teased. Steve blushed slightly.
"...Shuddup," The crocodilian mutant muttered as he put his head down, trying to hide the slight blush he had. Regan smiled.
"Don't you worry, Steve. Andi is tough, and she can handle herself."
"...hope so," Steve mumbled quietly. He had really grown to like having the blue-scaled Texan girl around. She was one of the few girls to not make fun of his scale-covered skin, considering her own. She also liked a good brawl, and he was eager to show her some wrestling moves. He had also been keeping an eye on Laredo while she was gone.
"Steve, they will be gone as long as they need to be, and not a second more," Kristen answered with more conviction than even she expected. "You know she hates boring undercover assignments."
"Half surprised we haven't heard an update yet." Ren frowned in concern.
"They'll report in when they have something worth saying." Burn-Out waved her off. He'd been at the waiting game a lot longer than she or the kids knew what it was. "No use getting worked up about stuff that hasn't happened yet." He picked up a pad and started scribbling in it.
"What're you drawing?" Heart-Wrencher inquired.
"Just some ideas for shirt designs," Burn-Out explained. "Want to talk to the merchandising guys about them."
"...you are really liking this, aren't you?"
"Hell yeah!" Burn-Out grinned widely. "This place has gotten the best business it has ever had thanks to the show."
Ren decided to change the subject. "And what about the stuff that has happened that they can't talk about?" Ren countered. "What then?"
"We wait and trust the boss to have everything under control," Kristen interrupted, shocking the older woman into silence. "This is what he does, what he lives, breathes, thinks, and is. This is how he earned his place at Cobra. We have to trust that he knows what he's doing, or the twins can keep him from going too overboard on the dramatic schemes. Now, about those lovely artistic nudes of Congressman Schuller and his lover…"
"Which one?" Calvin answered. "The beauty queen, the furry, or the cross-dresser?"
"And why are we doing this at school?" His 'daughter' sat in front of him, legs crossed before her and lips twisted into a sneer. They were in an unused room on the third floor, preparing for her latest round of power training. He let her think she was avoiding him for most of the day, but this was too important to put off much longer. Not with Mindbender coming in two days from now.
"Because you need the practice filtering between 'familiar' and 'strange' people in your sensory radius and you won't get a much better testing area than this." Zartan explained. She hadn't quite managed to differentiate between all the 'familiar' people based on feel yet, but they could fine-tune that aspect later, at home. Sensing friend from foe rated higher on his teaching priority list, given the nature of this particular job. Mindbender's impending arrival with three Medi-Vipers and a pack of Dark Shadow's ninja added to the pressure. "Let's get started. Close your eyes, clear your mind, and cast your 'net' out as far as you can."
The technique was a variant of one he'd learned from the Arashikage clan, the original intent being to connect with the chi in all things around you. Most recruits to the clan didn't learn it until they either neared or passed their trials to become a full-fledged ninja, or showed so much talent as a chi-user that it couldn't be put off. He and perhaps two others were introduced to it soon after training began in earnest; to his knowledge, he was the only one who could do anything with the chi he sensed and even that didn't amount to much. Not compared to what he knew his apprentice could accomplish of once she mastered the meditation and sensory aspects.
He waited until her breathing and heart-rate slowed down to usual meditative levels before speaking again. "Now, tell me what's going on in the room to our left without losing track of the rest of your 'net'." This was the tricky part. She could sense a great distance out, and she could focus on things close by, but they'd only recently started the arduous process of maintaining both at the same time. He estimated it'd take about another month for her to get the hang of it.
Her brow furrowed as she worked. "There's a class. Organized, so the X-brats either aren't in it or like the teacher. Teacher's female, walking up by the dry erase boards. There's about thirty kids in their desks—don't know if they're sleeping or taking notes."
Well, it was better than last time. "Track field, and tell me while also tracking the teacher's movements." The track field was visible outside the window, but far enough away to give her fits.
If she hadn't been lost in meditation, he knew she'd have sworn under her breath and/or flipped him off. Anger management was essential for her, hence the focus on meditation while she was too injured for other types of training. "Gym class from hell's not in session, so there's no one out there to sense. Something fuzzy on the edges…"
"And the teacher?"
"Um…still pacing. Must be a good lecture."
"And from that pause you had to find her again." He expected as much, really. She'd always had trouble with focusing on more than one thing at a time. "Let's try something closer, then. The pacing teacher and the classroom below us." A muttered string of Austrian German profanity (and where had she picked those up? He hadn't started teaching her that dialect yet) managed to leak through the meditative state. "If you're focused enough to swear, you're not focused enough on the meditation. Find your center again then focus on your targets."
She growled but managed to get back into her 'almost a trance' state after a bit of fumbling. "Teacher to the left is standing still now, probably behind the desk since they're leaning. Downstairs…ugh, that's a mess. Wait, what are they doing to him?" A snarl twisted her expression from one of curiosity to one of malice.
"And the teacher next door?" He wanted to derail her train of thought before it left the station. With her this deep in a meditative trance and her powers zeroed in on people (who were mostly composed of water), he couldn't even begin to guess how that infamous temper of hers would affect others. As he'd re-iterated many times during the last two weeks, they didn't want a body count quite yet.
"Standing still in front of a wall," she said before shifting her focus back to the downstairs classroom. "Oh, when I get my hands on those little…"
"And what are they doing that's set you off?" Though, he could certainly hazard a guess. His poor brother knew how to scare Shadowatch into good behavior, but didn't know how to accomplish the same with the students of Bayville High.
"He's duct-taped to the **** door!" she growled. "They're all throwing crap at each other or trying to do something with glue to his hair and face." She was all for pranks involving craft supplies, but only if the other party deserved it. Zandar hadn't and they both knew it. "That's assault. We can press charges for that."
"They'll never stick and you're stalling. Hallway outside our room." The noise she made in response to that order lent more proof to his suspicion that there was a lot more predator in her mutation than most people realized. Prey animals didn't make that kind of harsh, angry growl. Whatever sea-monster her mutation based itself on, it had to rate near or on top of the food chain. Probably swam in pods of close relatives too, given how team-oriented she was. He made a mental note to talk to their vampire contact about it. The man had been around two thousand years and was bound to know something helpful.
"Someone walking past the door; has lots of cans and bottles of stuff in front of them, so probably the janitor."
While he'd love to ask her to tell him which janitor, she hadn't been around that bumbling moron Bazooka long enough to tell him apart from every other stranger in the school. She recognized the Dreadnoks, Nightcrawler, Mystique, and Fred every time (which made a lot more sense now than it did last week), with a seventy-thirty track record on placing the Baroness and any other mutants with mutations affecting their physiology. The only Joe she was close to identifying consistently was Zarana's on-again, off-again lover. "Status report."
"Zanya's in class with her 'friends', Monkeywrench is out of range and 'Rana's right on the edge of it doing something with another person." She paused and tilted her head to the left. "Your girlfriend's heading straight for us from the east stairwell."
Which meant it was time to call it a day, he decided. "Not bad. Release the sensory net and pick up your things. Whether or not you actually show up for chemistry class today, you can't stay here by yourself."
Deep blue eyes glared through slit eyelids. "What, can't you wait until school's over to go at it like bunnies? Or do you enjoy having people overhear?"
He glared back. "First of all, that was highly inappropriate and you can consider yourself grounded for the next two days." He'd have made the sentence longer if he hadn't needed her to interact with other students. It would be difficult to manage that if she couldn't leave the base for the next two weeks, especially since he wasn't sure they'd be here much longer. "Second of all, this is strictly about business." Granted, meeting after hours was a fair bit more difficult with their current schedules, but neither he nor Mystique enjoyed being interrupted by nosy teenagers. "Third, it's almost time for the end-of-period bell and you still have places to be in this school today."
"Fine. Whatever." She sneered and rose from a sitting lotus position with slightly-hampered fluidity—the cast threw off her sense of balance and thus made it harder to adjust from sitting to standing. Given more time to heal and learn, she'd be as much a force of nature as the element under her command. "Don't expect to see me in class. We did bomb safety last year."
For most children, that would have been an attempt at sarcasm with no fact behind it, but he'd sat Shadowatch down for the basics before and after the Chronotech job and knew she didn't need a refresher course. "Wherever you go, be careful. I wouldn't put it past our dearly beloved co-workers to pop in early to scope things out." More Dark Shadow than Doctor Mindbender, honestly. The ninja was up to something, and it hadn't missed his or Destro's notice that the two-timing Arashikage Master harbored an unusual fixation on mutants in general and Shadowatch in particular. There was a fifty-fifty chance of a kidnapping or kill-on-sight order out for his apprentice when the plan came to a head, and which one she got all depended on whether or not the renegade ninja found her tractable enough to mess with.
The only bright spot in that particular storm cloud was that the recruits Dark Shadow initiated as 'ninja' from the recruiting pool inside Cobra weren't up to the Arashikage standard and thus stood a decent chance of being trapped if they had time to plan an ambush. Oh, they made up the best commando unit in Cobra, but they weren't on par with Storm Shadow or Jinx, or even himself. They didn't have the experience for that yet.
She muttered under her breath as she left the room, beating Mystique's entrance by a scant few seconds. The longing, conflicted gaze on the other woman's face wasn't a figment of his imagination. "Do you know she's managed to be everywhere I wasn't today?" She asked.
"She tried the same tactic with me, but I know her class schedule," he said, crossing his arms. "Was there a reason you came? We both have class in about ten minutes."
"The lawyers are in the process of re-negotiating Victor's visitation rights." And by "re-negotiating" she meant "revoking in entirety". They'd agreed on that much already. She folded her arms across her chest, which further amplified the 'petulant goth girl' aesthetic of her current disguise. "Now, what, precisely, are your intentions toward my daughter?"
And that was the question, wasn't it? Good thing he'd been prepared for it. "My intentions are to see that she survives past the age of eighteen and grows into the person she's becoming. I intend for her to feel safe and valued for as long as she stays with my organization. Even you can't argue about whether or not she needs the help; not after last year."
A shiver twitched her shoulders. Parts of last year had been utter hell from his end of things, but he couldn't imagine having a child on their deathbed half a country away and not being permitted to visit. "She'd been doing so well…" she trailed off into silence, eyes fixed on an image of her own mind's conjuration. "You know, I let her have the dog so she'd have a reason to want to get out of bed in the morning? Then she does that…"
"If it's any consolation, there was little anyone else could have done for her. I tried. She wanted to fix herself on her own and came up with a 'solution' she thought workable." And he doubted any amount of interrogating on his part would have changed things, sad as it was. Once Andi got an idea, she tended to run with it and poke at it until it materialized into a reality.
"How in the hell was that a workable solution?" Her hazel eyes flashed gold, pinning him with a glare so eerily like her daughter's he wondered how he missed the connection before. "Two months medical leave, putting everyone else through hell worrying about her…worried she'd try again…" She shook herself in an attempt to get rid of the unwanted memories, not that it did any good.
"Yet somehow she got it into her head that it was her fault things were messed up and falling apart and thus she had to fix it," he told her. "I thought allowing her to go on the trip to see her older brother would help, but she came back worse than she started." And it wasn't the brother's fault, of that he was certain.
"…I'm going to hack his balls off with a rusted butter knife and feed them back to him through a meat grinder." She growled. He visibly winced. It was an effective threat but ouch. He did not envy Sabretooth at all. No sane man would in that situation. "And I take it she didn't exactly have his approval before this job?"
"The other children all say he abandoned them to their own devices shortly before SHIELD took an interest in them." And you didn't turn a bunch of barely-teenagers loose on their own. Too much could go wrong with that scenario, though it did nicely showcase Shadowatch's ability to stick together and soldier on…
A string of Austrian German profanity involving men doing improbable things with uncomfortably large objects sounded in preface to her punching a brand new hole in the wall. Blood and plaster stuck to her hand as she pulled the fist back out, but she never flinched or lost control of the form she currently wore.
He regretted having to explain the new hole in the wall to the current principal, but at least he'd figured out where his apprentice learned some of her foul language from. Along with how to throw a stiff right hook. "If you're quite done, we both have other places to go today."
The mulish look she sent his direction was another expression shared with her youngest child. Some part of him realized all dates from here on out were going to be awkward as hell if he kept noticing things like that. She shook her hand, sending small bits of debris flying as she moved. Cold eyes examined the injury. "I don't suppose you have a first aid kit handy?"
He sighed. What was it with Darkholme women and injuring themselves while angry? Must be a genetic thing. "Third drawer of the desk, only thing in there."