OOOOOKKKKKK….. This is my first real fanfic that I'm writing by myself! Wahoo! So pleaseee review it!!! I appreciate any kind of feedback, replies, colorful constructive criticism… whatever! Really, I promise! I need that feedback! so FEED ME!
Disclaimer: I do not own any of the X-Men, Marvel does. No duh. Cause you see, if I owned them, I wouldn't be writing this right now. Instead, I'd be on some Hawaiian cruise with Hugh Jackman… but I'm not, I'm sitting here and writing this, promise! There's scientific evidence for ya that I don't own any of the characters in this story. So please don't sue me! Pretty please! With a cherry-popping daddy on top??!! Umkay…
This is dedicated to: My best friend Blink whom I miss very much!!! TEB rocks! :-p
Special thanx to: all the people at the Wolvie & Jubes storyboard who inspire me every day!
Enjoy!
"This means dialogue"
/This means thought or telepathic dialogue/
~"This means whisper"~
Chapter 1
Clarice
Clarice Ferguson was alone. She had been alone for months now, although she didn't exactly know how many. She had been alone ever since that unfortunate accident with Tommy…….
No, wait. I'll start over.
Ever since Clarice turned fourteen and started going through puberty, strange things began happening to her. Not just the normal sort of changes every teenager goes through at that critical point in their life, but different sort of changes, within her as well as in her appearance.
First, her hair started to change color slightly. It would vary from a light shade of reddish gold in some places to golden red in others to almost.…… pink in others. Finally, she decided to dye it light brown altogether to avoid standing out too much.
Her skin began to turn pale, her face seemed almost transparent and was beginning to take on a bluish shade. To top it off, strange marks of different shades of pale purple and blue began to appear on her face, mainly in the area around her eyes. First, they were there temporarily, but later on became permanent.
Her parents took her to every single dermatologist they could find to figure out what was going on with their daughter. The astonished doctors could only give them one answer—stress. Plain old teenage stress and hormones were "causing an uneven and random distribution of melanin and pigmentation throughout her body".
/Right. All of this bullsh*t and more/ Clarice thought. She knew what was really going on in her body. The problem was whether her family would understand and learn to accept the fact that she was one of them, that she was a mutant… /There's hope/ she thought.
At around the age of sixteen she found out that there's more to her powers than just physical appearance. She had noticed the ability to teleport and misplace objects without touching them. She found this ability quite useful at first, until she discovered its true destructive nature.
…It was a dark Thursday afternoon. Clarice was just fooling around, she wasn't even angry at her silly 9-year-old brother who was running around and making enough noise to wake the dead. All she wanted to do was to finish her homework, all she wanted to do was to make him disappear at that moment. She decided to really test her capabilities to the max.
She sat up, looked at her brother, and concentrated on teleporting him to another room. He was the heaviest object she had ever teleported in her entire life, and it took most of her energy. She fainted slightly, and after she came to her senses, she found out that she had succeeded in the teleporting….. only partially… The remaining scraps of what used to be her cheerful sibling were now lying in an artistic mess scattered around the room, a pool of blood surrounding them. She never even heard a scream… In fact, the only sound was the soft drumming of the rain against the windowsill…and the unbearable silence…
After this, it was hard to tell what was going on. She didn't remember running away, she didn't even remember the reason she ran away, all was a confusing blur in her mind—the defence mechanism of her body against the shock.
She woke up in a cold, dark, and damp sewage, where, as it turned out, she had been sleeping alongside local bums and drunkards for the past couple of days. They seemed very nice to her, and upon her awakening cheered loudly and even toasted to her health. Sounds strange?
"Lass, we thot you was dead!" a toothless bum grinned at her exposing his blackened gums.
That's how Clarice first made her aquaitance with the inhabitants of the underground city, or "Sewage City", as she preferred to call it. Most of them were bums and druggies, but they were harmless people. She did also meet several other teenage mutants who ran away from home out of fear of their powers or damage caused by them, like she did. This somewhat comforted her.
In the company of her new friends, she found out about the Brotherhood. The teenagers in Sewage City talked about it often, but none of them would ever have the courage to actually join it because, for one ting, it would mean having to go up to the surface world and expose themselves to others, and for another, most of them just heard stories about it, nobody was sure that it actually existed…
But our young Clarice knew that the Brotherhood, whether or not it existed, was her only hope, it was her only chance for survival in this world. She set out on her journey to find it.