AN: You can expect an update about this time every Saturday. Questions, comments, flames, plot ideas, and pairing suggestions may be emailed to me at angels_whore2001@yahoo.com

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Code Green

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It was the first day of a brand new year at Edgemont Senior High School. The future loomed bright and stood as open as the Space-Time continuum with endless possibilities. This day was going to be perfect, he could feel it, nothing was going to stand in the way of his conquest on this greatest of days!

"Ladies!" He grinned, strolling up to a fine gaggle of chatting females as they discussed their last minute lunch plans, "Never fear! I will solve all your problems by taking all of you lovely babes out with me."

The leader, a cute blond, rolled her eyes, "Like, get a life Hacker!"

"There's no cause for jealousy ladies!" He called over their giggles, spreading his arms wide with a goofy grin as they walked en masse away, "There's plenty of geek to go around! Come on, embrace your inner geek!"

"How 'bout I squash my inner geek, Johannes?"

"Eh heh…" he winced, turning around with his hands still held out. "Bill…. How's it hangin'?"

"Or better yet," the football player sneered as he leaned in close, shoving the smaller boy off balance. "Why don't I just start with you?"

Hacker chuckled nervously, readjusting his backpack on his shoulder. "Ah, humorous as ever Bill. Glad to see nothing's cha—" He was thankfully interrupted by the bell. "Oh dear, would love to stay and chat ol' chap, but I gotta run, first period and all that rot."

He waited for them to go, his hazel eyes flicking from one face to the next anxiously but when neither Bill nor his little entourage of like-minded jockstraps moved, he felt his stomach drop. "Uh…'scuse me…" he mumbled, slowly squeezing his way through the impenetrable road block. Please, please…he prayed, his eyes clenched tight against the inevitable.

"See ya in gym, Geek-boy." Bill's voice jeered as two hands slammed into his back pack, driving him into the already littered floor to a chorus of mocking laughter as Bill and his posse strutted off, leaving him to pick himself up.

"Brainless ignoramus!" He gritted to the floor, angrily brushing a gum wrapper off of his sleeve as he regained his feet, pulling his back pack in front of him to check that his beloved computer was unharmed by the barbarian layman's brutish behavior.

Barbarian laymen…A cocky grin lighted back on his face as he pulled out his laptop, starting it up in the middle of the hall to ascertain that all was good for go, before he closed it down and slung his bag back over his shoulder.

"Mr. Johannes," a familiar feminine voice from behind him started. "I believe the morning bell has already rung."

Hacker jerked around, his eyes wide at the sight of the assistant principal's resigned face, "Ms. Steele! Positively wonderful morning we have today isn't it? How was your summer? Glad to be back in school?" He smiled hopefully as her dark brow arched, "Ah… So how 'bout those Mets?"

Ms. Steele shook her graying head and handed him a pink slip, already made out much to his chagrin. "Not even through with first period, Mr. Johannes, and already you've earned yourself lunch detention. Room 126 A, 11:45, if you please." She sighed, "Now get to class."

He winced, shrugging his other arm through the remaining strap of his bag. "Yes, ma'am. Have a nice day."

He had to chuckle wryly to himself as he folded up the referral and put it carelessly into the pocket of his corduroys. Today was the first day of the new school year. The possibilities were as endless as the universe, and as varied as the night sky.

He grinned, whistling Darth Vader's theme song as he walked down the hall to calculus.

This year was gonna be good.

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"In this class you will be graded on the neatness of your binder; your notes need to be in proper order, with dividers for the daily journal responses, the hand outs, and…"

Tamara frowned in annoyance as her English teacher kept droning into her spacing-out time. Ms. Crumb's nasally voice put her in the running for the most annoying teacher in history, and with her sea-green blazer and matching skirt she was impossible to look at. Hell, even the chick's shoes were that same horrible shade.

Ugh. Her eyes snuck a glance at the large, round grate-covered clock. 5 minutes down, 50 more to go. She groaned inwardly, her head flopping back in dramatized boredom. Why the hell did every teacher feel the need to go through the same, lame, speech?

"Okay, now to get started, I want every one to take out a piece of paper and write one page summarizing what you did over the summer. I'll be passing out these 3x5 note cards while you're doing that; when you're finished with your summary, I want you to fill them out with the information to the questions I'll write on the board. Let's get started."

Tamara rolled her eyes as she mechanically pulled out her notebook and flipped it to a clean page. Not even 3rd period yet, and already it's previously pristine paper was riddled with doodles.

Tapping her pen idly against the plastic neon bracelets on her other wrist, she thought about what she wanted to make up this time. She wrote something different on each of them, knowing the teachers never looked at them for longer than it took to place a red checkmark in the top margin anyway.

Hmmm… She smirked to herself, and began to write.

_This summer, I went 2 Disny land, and I saw Pluto whose my favrite puppet in 4 ever…_

Another ten minutes of drivel gave her a paper so horrendous it would give her teacher a headache to rival the one her outfit was giving her students. She re-read it critically, scratching out some words and replacing them with words as equally misplaced and misspelled, making certain all her /i/'s were dotted with hearts, and the little daisies surrounding her name each had smiley faces in their centers.

Satisfied, she finally turned to the note card and began filling that out as well. Name, age, species, same blasted thing every teacher had all of their students fill out in every class at the beginning of every year. She wondered bitterly if any one was ever stupid enough to write anything other than "human" there, even as she scribbled "Caucasian," spicing things up a bit and dotting the /i/ with a rose instead of a heart.

Another glance at the clock doomed her to the knowledge that 35 minutes still separated her from the steaming hot basket of fries she planned on subduing for her lunch. Ugh. How long were they going to have to sit here? Damn, she hated school. Why couldn't she just drop out? It's not like she'd be able to get a good job anyway, even if she went to college, since any job that promised to pay more than minimum wage screened for mutants in the interviewing process, or they would within the next ten years.

Of course, talking to her foster parents, you'd never know it. Marilyn was always going on about how Tamara could be such a great VJ when she 'grew up' and David wouldn't shut up about her math and science grades, telling all of his coworkers at the plant that she was going to be a designer for Bowing some day, boasting about her as if she were his own flipping daughter. It was pathetic, really. They were so naïve that she really didn't have much of a choice but play along when they beamed at her grade over dinner, or when they sat up late at night murmuring so that she wouldn't hear about how they were going to save this month for her college. Her foster parents were two whacked out humans, but she guessed they were okay…in a human sort of way, of course.

"Okay, pass your note cards and papers to the front of your rows. When I call your name, please grab one of these yellow text books and come to my desk and I'll assign you your book for the year." Mrs. Crumb gestured one sea-green arm toward two mountains of books.

Her head flopped back with a groan; she'd have to survive another half hour of boredom.

When the bell finally rang, Tamara was out of there before the teacher could give the redundant 'I am the one to dismiss you, not the bell' speech, and was halfway down the hall before she was caught.

"Miss Evans, no running in the halls!"

"What now?" She groaned, rolling her eyes as she stopped amid the river of likewise rushing students, turning to face the scowling red pit bull face of her economy teacher.

"Yes Mr. MacDonald, I'm really sorry, I won't do it again," She winced at the insolent tone her voice took of it's own accord. Doomed, doomed, doomed…

"Miss Evans, that tone of voice is inappropriate." His wrinkled old face grew dangerously red, "Maybe lunch detention will remind you of that?"

"No! …I mean, I'm really sorry Mr. MacDonald, it's been a really lousy day and I'm on my period, and…" she faded out, watching his ruddy face pale as he blustered at that last bit of lie. Every girl used it, and every teacher knew it, but no one was willing to call the bluff.

"Well, that being what it is," He muttered gruffly, his liver spotted leathery hands almost shaking as he filled out her referral and she could almost hear him wishing for the days of yore, when women didn't throw things like mysterious bodily functions out in arguments. "It's no excuse for running in the halls young lady."

She sighed, kissing her fries goodbye. There was no way she'd make it through the line in the ten minutes she was allowed before role was taken in detention. She knew that from experience, lots and lots of experience. "Yes Mr. MacDonald." She gritted, taking perverse delight in his clenched jowls as his watery blue eyes met hers.

"I think a week would be enough time to get you over your hormones, Miss. Evans."

"What? That's not fair!"

"You've got seven minutes to get your lunch before you're tardy, Miss Evans," he glanced uncaringly at his watch as he handed her the pink slip. "They'll be expecting you, you had better hurry."

"Fu—dge." She winced as the teachers old eyes narrowed on her as he shook his head at her save. Cussing was an automatic 3 day lunch detention. "Get going, Miss Evans."

Fuck.

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Lunch detention was many things to different people. To some, it was the horror of horrors, where the hopelessly uptight sweat and fidgeted in their far back corners of the room and flinched every time the detention monitor turned his glare upon them. To others, it was a club, where they and their contemporaries could mingle as freely as they did in the hallways during lunch. There were those who faced it as an annoyance, slumping low in their desks, seething at the injustice that had brought them to their present fate.

Then, there were those people like Kilroy, who couldn't care less where they were, so absorbed were they in one project or another that they barely even noticed their surroundings, let alone noticed them enough to formulate an opinion of them.

*

Arthur: If there is an enemy, there will be a hero. Where there is a hero, there will be an enemy. The one cannot exist without the other.

Carrey: You mean, if, when, we dust this psycho... we'll die too?

Arthur: Perhaps. Or you may just loose your special abilities.

Carrey: Whoa, back up! 'Special abilities?!'

Arthur: *amused* Yes, you didn't think you'd be fighting a supreme evil with guns, did you?

Carrey: Well... yeah, actually.

Arthur: *sigh* You Americans, so lacking in flair.

Carrey: Look, just 'cause we don't dress like fags--

Arthur: Now let's not get personal here. You each have an ability, or power. If you think about it, it becomes painfully obvious; your career choices alone have mirrored this power within you.

Carrey: Look weirdo, I don't know what you're talking about, I'm a sewage sucker for Christ's sake! I suck peoples crap into tanks. And if you tell me *that's* my 'Special Power' I'm gonna walk right now.

Arthur: Actually, it is. *smirk* You 'suck' waste energy, although in this case it isn't into any receptacle other than your self. Once gathered, you focus this excess into a powerful attack.

Carrey: Oh God. *darkly* You mean I was *fated* to be a fucking sewage plumber?! How low is that?!

Arthur: Ah, I am certain that had you bothered to finish high school, Mr. Greves, you would have found yourself in a slightly more lucrative, and possibly more *ahem* appealing form of employment.

Carrey: Like?

Arthur: If you are going to be tenacious about it, one such alternative occurs: a therapist.

Carrey: *grumbles*

Adam: So, do we like, get to fly? And wear matching costumes or something?

*

"…For a code green…"

Kilroy snapped out of his creative haze, his eyes locked on the scribbled words lining the open notebook he'd been working in, unseeing as the only words he'd heard of the short announcement calling for assistance echoed like a bell's toll in his ears.

Code green…they found someone.

Cautiously, he swallowed, gripping his pen all the tighter as he tried to look relaxed, and glanced around the room surprisingly crowded for the first day of school. Although students weren't supposed to know the faculty emergency codes, most did anyway, and everyone knew what a code green meant.

Somewhere, there was a very unlucky mutant about to be surprised.

As he looked around, he saw was pair upon pair of smug, hate-filled eyes gazing at the wall-mounted intercom through which the announcement had come, with some sort of righteous fervor spilling from every pore of their faces. Dotted among them were pitying glances and resigned shakes of teenage heads, and there were even a few curious ones, already speculating who the new pariah might be.

*

Arthur: My dear man, you read too many comic books.

*

...He gritted his teeth, the words swimming before his eyes as they fell back to his desk before any one noticed his attention, his pen shaking against the clean paper. It was only a matter of time before they got him, too.

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