8.

"HELP! HELP!"

She ran headlong toward the nearest fork of road with five orcs behind her, laughing and shouting at her.

"Somebody HELP ME!"

The orcs were gaining both speed and distance, and she could hear their foul breaths behind her. "No!!!"

The orcs continued to laugh. One of them stopped and took out a bow and shot at her.

The arrow flew harmlessly over her head, which only served to heighten her hysteria and further excite the orcs.

A rustle from the both sides of the road stopped the orcs dead in their tracks. Three men stepped out of the left, two women on the right. The scared-looking woman they had just chased now nonchalantly stopped and turned toward them.

"Well boys," she said a bit breathlessly, "it was fun while it lasted." Taking out a dagger hidden under her robe she joined the women. "Now I'll get even with you all. And then some."

The orcs cried aloud, this time in fear.


"You'd make a very good actress were you to born in another life," Jean commented as they walked in groups of three, the men in front of the women.

"I like acting," Jubilee said, twirling her dagger in the air and caught it with one gloved hand: Emma gasped in fear and excitement. "Besides, that wasn't hard. Only next time a quicker appearance would be better. Did you see that damned orc tried to turn me into a porcupine?"

"Darling, he only shot you once." It was Ray.

Jubilee took a pebble and threw it at him; it hit him squarely at the head. Jean raised an eyebrow. "You're becoming very good with targets."

"Hey, I'm a thief, remember?" she said proudly.

"I don't think it's something to be proud of," Emma said, who kept on stumbling over her robe. "Ach! I hate this robe! How can someone stand this?"

"Would you prefer to wear nothing than stumbling over some stupid robe, Emma?" Bobby asked from in front.

"I don't care! Just release me from this hell."

It was probably half an hour later when they stopped for a break. "Where are we going?" Jean asked as they started off again.

"I don't know. But Bobby seemed to be sure that we should be going toward the big X."

Jean stared at Logan in disbelief. "Uh-huh. Then what will we do when we get there?"

"Maybe we'll find a way out of this," Jubilee said.

"But can't we just get out of here?"

"We can't, that's the problem," Logan said. "If we could would we have been here when you girls entered?"

"Maybe you boys enjoyed it too much to go away," Emma remarked. Suddenly she stopped. "Everybody stop. I think I lost my dice."

"Your WHAT?" they all chorused.

"How could you lose it? That's… that's like, your LIFE around here!" Bobby said.

Jubilee patted his shoulders. "Bobby, it's just a dice - "

"It's not JUST a DICE!" he roared which made Jubilee immediately back away from him. "It's your LIFELINE! Your damned lifeline! How do you suppose you are to move without a DICE!?"

The rest was too shocked to say anything. Emma, for the first time ever, was on the verge of crying. Her shoulders were shaking uncontrollably. "I'm sorry, Bobby," she muttered.

"What, you think saying sorry brings back the dice?! Why can't you be more careful!? Why can't ANY of you?!"

"Cool it, man. She only lost her dice, no big deal," Ray said, staring at him in a worried way.

Bobby raised his hands upwards in contempt and with a scornful grunt he threw his dice onto the ground and walked on, leaving the rest behind.

"What crawled up his ass last night?" Logan asked, staring at Bobby who was far beyond them.

"Maybe Rosie O'Donnell." Jubilee patted Emma's shoulder who was by now crying. "Hey, Ms. Frost. Cool it. You'd bleach the green away from the robe if you don't stop the plumbing."

Charles Xavier found that he was utterly alone.

Too lazy to use his telepathy he instead called every room in the mansion - which proved more tiring than telepathy, he had to confess later. Which also made him wonder: how could Jubilee stand beside a telephone and kept on punching numbers and yakking without end.

The last room number was tried, and there was nobody. Did he give a leave today? No, it was not in his organizer; nothing of that sort was written in his personal diary, either. Maybe they went to a field trip. But they should have some sort of letter for that. Or was it his birthday and they planned a surprise party?

Blushing temporarily for that vain thought he shook his head a few times and programmed his wheelchair to go to the bathroom.


"This is what we've went through for?"

"I thought we would at least find a town!"

"Where is the princess?"

"I want to go home."

"I wanna pee!"

"SHUT UP!" Bobby shouted above the rest. He'd been doing that excellently these times, and he did not know why the others did not go against him. Like he cared why. "I don't know, okay! But we're finally here, so let's start looking for anything that will lead us out of here."

"What do you expect to find in a ruined city like this?" Ray asked, looking around.

"Something. Anything."

"I guess he can't be more specific than that," Jubilee said and went away before Bobby's wrath got the better of him.

As the rest spread out, Bobby found that he was also quite surprised. He had high hopes, but now it seemed that nothing was in his expectation. It was two days ago that they came across clues of settlements that seemed to have been deserted for some reason. That did much to raise their spirits.

And now… this. A ruin. A ruin of a city, it seemed, from the breadth of it. He could see stone walls - what's the left of it - running for miles and miles beyond before making a comeback at the other far side of the ruin. Earlier on they came across the remains of a great archway that must have served as the city's main gate.

"What happened here?" Ray suddenly asked him. Bobby looked around.

"Maybe a war," he replied. "But that's not a sure thing, either. This looks too widespread to be some sort of a war."

"Doesn't war leave a mess like this?" Ray asked.

"Not this one it doesn't. Look," Ray pointed to his far right where they both could see Emma and Logan tried to pry some heavy beam off some structure to look for clues. "Soldiers of war don't get this destructive; they don't destroy everything in sight. They destroy enemies, not structures. Well, not basically. And how do you suppose you can at least stay alive if you wipe out the whole population of the city you wanted to conquer?"

"Makes sense," Jean said, appearing in front of them. "You can't just come in and kill and destroy everything in sight and then leave. You have got to at least eat."

"This place looks like it's been under siege for quite a while," Ray said.

"But at some places fire is still burning," Logan said, approaching them from the right with Emma. "It could have been quite a while though; some fires can start all by itself after a while."

"We've found this," Emma said, giving Bobby a small sack. Bobby took it and opened it. His eyes widened in disbelief as Emma went on. "Found it underneath the burnt beam. We cannot think of how could it get there."

"What is it?" Jubilee asked, wiping her sooty face with the back of her hand.

Bobby took it out of the sack. It was a lump of dough, the kind that a baker would use to bake a bread. It was still soft and moist.


"None of this make any sense," Logan remarked as they sat around the fire later that night.

Ray threw in a stick into the fire and watched as the red fireflies form, float upward and disappear. "Pretty much. So what do we do now?" he asked, looking around.

"I suppose there is no harm in waiting. Is there?" Emma said, turning to Bobby.

Bobby stared at her thoughtfully. "I guess not," he said finally. "But don't let your guards down. Anything can happen. And we still can't figure out the dough."

"A large battalion couldn't have done such a magnitude of destruction in minutes it seemed," Jean said. "I swear that the dough still bore fingerprints of whoever rolled it before… before whatever cataclysm happened here."

"Whatever that was, it sure happened quick. And furious." Logan stared at the ruined walls that surrounded them which functioned as a border. "Whatever that was, it sure wasted no time in destroying the whole city."

They slept early that night. Morning came without much incident and they probed the ruins further, to nothing.

"This is like some kind of a very, very lame game," Ray remarked as they rested for the morning. "Are we bound to stuck here forever?"

"Don't say that!" Emma said. "I hate that word; forever. In fact I hate everything about this… this game we're playing." She pointed at Bobby. "This is all your fault! You shouldn't have bought this game!"

"Hey, I didn't actually remember inviting any of you," Bobby retorted without looking at her.

"Oh…" Emma stared at him angrily, then she began to shake all over. Jubilee noted this and shook her head. "Look what you've done," she said as she walked over to Emma. "You made her cry."

The others raised their eyebrows. "I wish I had a camera," Logan said.

Suddenly a deafening roar came from somewhere beneath them made all of them stood up in attention. "What was that?" Emma asked, wiping her eyes and gripping her Polant Staff. It glowed briefly.

"I think it's from below us." Logan began to kneel and stare at the ground.

"What are you doing?" Jubilee asked.

"I'm a ranger, remember?"

Bobby pursed his lips. "Now that's new. A berserker ranger."

"Okay already! You're making me lose concentration!"

They all stood around Logan who put his ears on the ground and listened. The memory of the roar was not far from their minds, and they stood at guard, expecting anything to pop out from behind the ruined walls.

At last Logan rose. "Nothing."

Disbelief was on their faces. "Nothing?" Emma asked. "What kind of a ranger are you?"

"Your chatters made me lose concentration! Plus I've just acquired this, okay! Now let's get off this place," he said, angrily as he walked off.

"Where are you going?" Bobby asked as Logan walked past him.

Logan stopped in his tracks. He pointed to the west. "I think there's a path from here to the edge of the city where the walls and the moat meets."

"What exactly do you have in mind?" Ray asked.

"Well, if whatever that hollered to us just now lived under us, then we need to get under." Logan rolled his eyes. "Clear enough for you? Or does anyone need a spank at the head?"

"I don't mind you do that on my ass," Emma said with a small voice but already pulling up her robe and shoving her wonderfully shaped ass to Logan. "Not so hard."

Jean grabbed hold of Emma's wrist and pulled her behind her before the hungry-eyed men with eagerly outstretched hands could even get their hands on Emma's ass. "What's the matter with you!?" Jean asked.

"I think I need a spank," Emma said, her cheeks flushing red.

Will Emma be spanked? Will they find whatever that hollered just now? Will the professor find out? Wait up, guys...