Chapter 22
Jen stepped through the door, and walked down the spiral stairs, that were made of steel. The handrail was cold and the light was dim, bluish. She felt like she was underwater, instead of underground, everything was so silent, she could hear herself breath. She stopped at the foot of the stairs, finally hearing something; a discussion between two familiar voices.
"She's my daughter, Samantha, and there is nothing you can do now to change that!"
"No, Ransik, she is my daughter, I let you have her all these years because I couldn't take care of her, but now I can, and I need her, so I'm claiming her."
"You can't claim her! Besides she would never do anything you want! She's not evil like you are!"
"I am not evil, I just have different ideas!"
"Get her out of that container now!" Ransik demanded loudly.
"Why would I do that? Why are you fighting me, Ransik? We are on the same side! You know how I feel about you!"
"You feel nothing about anyone!" he answered. "I refuse to play your game any longer!"
"Well, I am sorry to hear you say that, honey," she said.
"Get Nadira out of that container!"
"I won't," The woman said.
Suddenly, the container where Nadira was, a large crystal tank filled with water, exploded. The explosion originated a chain reaction that made the other tanks that contained various mutants explode. Some of those mutants looked almost human, other looked dangerous; others weak and some others were just plain ugly.
"My babies!" The Mistress yelled and looked towards the stairs.
"My buddy here asked you to release his daughter," Jen said in a toneless voice.
"How dare you enter here? You are not worthy of entering my lab!"
'Shut up!' Jen ordered mentally and she did.
The mutants began to stir, and some of them, coincidentally the most dangerous looking ones, got to their feet. "I bet you wish you hadn't made all those tanks explode now," The mistress said.
Jen smiled evilly. "Why would I?" she asked. "I came here to destroy you all, and that's what I'm going to do."
The Mistress chuckled. "All by yourself? I'd like to see you try it!" she mocked.
Jen shrugged, and turned around, walking towards the stairs. 'Come and get me,' she ordered the mutants that were awake as she climbed the stairs. She got out of the hidden door and into the warehouse. She still had a few seconds to study her surroundings and make a plan.
"Jen? Is everything alright?" Lucas asked.
"Go," she said simply, adding a mental order to her words. "Get Alex out of here, and leave!"
She didn't like what she was going to do, but she had no choice. If she froze these mutants, if she let them get away or escape, then The Mistress would gather them all again and attack in almost no time. If she wanted to stop her, she was going to have to break the rules of the Time Force and kill these mutants.
The others took Alex outside and Jen closed the door just in time, because the mutants started to pour out of the hidden door right at that moment. She focused all her mind on them, so she could attack them more than one at a time. She sent a weak looking one flying against some tubes and heard its skull crush.
She then wrapped some chains that hung from the ceiling around the throats of two strong looking ones and strangled them, while she fought physically to keep the others away from her.
She crushed a couple of human looking ones with some really heavy boxes it took her a lot of focus to move. Again she heard the bones crush. She knew those sounds were going to stay in her nightmares, like the noises the wolves made. She hit three of them with a giant hook used to lift the boxes. They crashed against the walls.
Soon Jen realized there were too many of them, there were more than she had expected and they grew stronger, as she grew weaker. She had a headache. She had never used her power for so long and with such strength. She was tired and hurt and the mutants were just too many.
******************
The Mistress grabbed two syringes from a cabinet and approached Ransik from behind. He was distracted, waking Nadira up, and checking if she was okay.
"I'm sorry we had to do this the hard way, Ransik, my dear," she whispered, and plunged the needle deep into Ransik's neck.
He was stunned for a few seconds, during which time the woman injected Nadira. Then she approached the main computer and started to run a program.
"Come, we have to get out of here," she ordered Nadira and Ransik, who followed her. "It will be a fresh start for us."
********************
Just when Jen was about to give up, she received a thought. I have to get out of here, before the whole place blows up. It came from The Mistress.
The lab was in self-destruct mode and she was escaping through a back door. Jen ran to the door and opened it, holding the mutants back with her mind control powers and got out, bolting the door behind her. She had barely gotten a few feet away from the building, when it blew up, killing all the mutants inside, turning them into a giant fireball.
For a few seconds, she and the other rangers were stunned, looking at the flames.
********************
The Mistress looked at the fire, tears filling her eyes. "One of these days, Jennifer Scotts, One of these days."
*******************
Jen snapped back to reality and ran towards the back of the building, focusing on The Mistress, trying to stop her.
Alex, now completely healed by his friends, ran behind her. "Jen, wait up!" he called her.
"Alex, go back," she said. "This will get messy; I don't want you to."
"I know who she is," he said simply, looking into Jen's eyes. "I want to stop her as much as you do."
"So do we," called Katie who had run after Alex, followed by Trip and Lucas. Jen nodded to them all and they ran side by side, meeting The Mistress when she was getting into a car. Jen forced her away from it.
"What else do you want?" The Mistress asked tiredly. "You have already killed all my children."
"I want to bring you to justice," Jen said.
"And I want answers," Alex said. "Mom."
"What was that?" The Mistress asked.
"I know it's you," he said. "Nobody but you has ever called Jen farm girl."
"She does come from a farm, doesn't she? It's not really that hard to figure out what to call her," The Mistress answered hurriedly.
"Mom, I know it's you," he said simply. "Tell me, why are you doing this?"
"Doing what?" she asked. "I am not your mother," she insisted.
Alex blinked slowly, and then looked at her, his face expressionless. "Mom, what did she do to you? Why do you hate her so much?"
"She.She." She seemed to be straining to come up with an answer. "Alexander," she finally said, admitting her true identity. "I had so many plans for you, you are one of my most beautiful creations, how could you think I would let you mix such perfect DNA with the DNA of that farm girl, with God knows what failures in her genes?"
"You don't like her because she wasn't engineered?"
"OF COURSE!!" the woman said. "Alexander, I'm a genetics engineer, I appreciate perfected DNA, and I hope my children marry people as well designed and perfect as they are," she explained.
"I can't believe this," Alex said sadly.
"Is what Ransik told me true?" Jen asked softly. "That you sent Nadira to him with Tatag, because you didn't want anybody to know..."
"Yes," she admitted. "I did, because it was a dangerous procedure, and many people were after her, and after her father, among them my own husband and my own child. Oh, if only Nadira knew all the plans I had for her."
"What plans? Selling her story to the newspapers?" she asked bitterly.
"Newspapers? No, if I hadn't trusted the wrong person, nobody would have known that Nadira was a mutant for many, many years. I wanted to raise her myself, with her brother," she said, pointing at Alex. "I wanted to be a mother for her, a true mother, and give her a true family away from her father and his crimes, away from the prejudices that exist towards mutants. I wanted her to be the daughter my husband never gave me."
"Because you always told him you wanted a boy," Alex said bitterly, his cheek showing the trail of a single bitter tear that had ran down it.
"Alexander," The Mistress said, drying his cheek. "Don't be jealous now, it's not proper for a gentleman."
"I'm not jealous," he said, his voice showing how he felt. "I'm just hurt. You lied to me for such a long time."
"And she's not done, yet," Jen said, her gaze lost into The Mistress's gaze. "Aren't you going to tell him the truth about you and Ransik?"
"What about her and Ransik?" Alex asked.
"He was my lover," The Mistress admitted. "Nadira is my daughter, from the mutant point of view, and from the human point of view."
"You cheated on Dad with Ransik? How could you?"
"Like I said, I appreciate good DNA, and Ransik is one of the most perfect mutants ever created, he is so powerful, and he was so gorgeous."
"Gorgeous?" Katie asked.
"He was, when he was first created," The Mistress explained. "He was incredibly handsome, but he was too powerful and too unstable, his DNA didn't hold tight for very long and began to react. The result was the monster you had to fight."
"So, powerful and cute don't mix?"
"Didn't mix by the time Ransik was created. They do now."
"Really?" Alex asked.
"Yes, Nadira is a great example of that."
"Nadira?" Lucas asked. They all looked at The Mistress with disbelief. Nadira was one of the weakest mutants they had ever met.
"Yes, you have never met the real Nadira, the true Nadira with all her power unlocked."
"And something tells me we don't want to," Lucas said.
"Why would you?" The Mistress asked. Suddenly, the Rangers heard a blast and fell face first to the floor, when it hit them from behind. Ransik walked towards The Mistress from behind the Rangers and stood next to her. Nadira was walking behind Ransik, and turned towards the Rangers, her eyes black, and lifeless.
She raised her hand and her nails grew to the size of swords as they always did, but this time they glowed pink, brightly. She swung her hand towards them and a blast of energy made its way towards them. It took all of Jen's focus to change its route and make it hit the burning building, provoking another explosion.
Ransik and Nadira got into the car, and The Mistress followed them. Ransik tried to start the car but he couldn't. He tried several times and failed.
"What's going on?" The Mistress asked.
You are not going anywhere, Jen told her mentally.
"What?" The Mistress asked in disbelief, looking at the woman lying on the floor, barely breathing. "This has got to be a joke."
It's not a joke, Jen assured her, lifting the car from the floor. You have done many horrible things, and you have to pay for them.
"This is impossible, you can't be this powerful!" The fear escaped her through her voice. She breathed hard and looked around, at Ransik and Nadira, looking for answers.
What's wrong? The almighty Mistress is afraid of a simple, insignificant farm girl? Jen asked, her voice tainted with bitter mockery. I don't believe it!
"That's enough!" The Mistress said. "Kill her!!" she ordered Ransik, and he nodded. He pointed at her and shot an energy ball that hit the building.
"What the hell is wrong with you?"
Are you ready to pay for all the abominations you have done in your life?
"Not yet!" was her answer, and a single gunshot was heard above the roar of the flames. The car fell to the ground, started and sped away. The Mistress had escaped.
*******************
The reinforcements Time Force had sent and the firemen got to the scene and found all five Rangers lying on the ground unconscious. Jennifer Scotts had a gunshot wound in her back, and was bleeding considerably, so she was the first one the paramedics took to the hospital. Her chances of surviving were lower than the rest.
"Hang on tight, Captain, you'll be alright," one of the paramedics told her.
*******************
Jen stood by the beach, looking at the ocean. She felt a pair of strong arms wrap around her.
"What's on your mind?" Alex asked her, whispering the words directly in her ear.
"She escaped. I let her get away," she answered.
"You did everything you could," he told her, holding her hand tight.
"I guess all we have to do now is plan the wedding, and hope she doesn't come back."
"What will happen if she does?"
"We'll get her."
"What happens if we can't?" he asked further.
"Who cares?" she answered, turning to kiss him. "The only thing that matters is that in the end, we are together. She lost, because she couldn't keep us apart."
"That's right" he said, smiling. He looked at the ocean, his eyes reflecting the movement of the waves. "From now on, it's you and me."
"Forever," she completed, smiling.
*******************
"Do you think she will come back?" Katie asked Alex.
"As soon as she can, she will," he answered.
"I wasn't talking about The Mistress," she said.
"Neither was I."
The End.
Jen stepped through the door, and walked down the spiral stairs, that were made of steel. The handrail was cold and the light was dim, bluish. She felt like she was underwater, instead of underground, everything was so silent, she could hear herself breath. She stopped at the foot of the stairs, finally hearing something; a discussion between two familiar voices.
"She's my daughter, Samantha, and there is nothing you can do now to change that!"
"No, Ransik, she is my daughter, I let you have her all these years because I couldn't take care of her, but now I can, and I need her, so I'm claiming her."
"You can't claim her! Besides she would never do anything you want! She's not evil like you are!"
"I am not evil, I just have different ideas!"
"Get her out of that container now!" Ransik demanded loudly.
"Why would I do that? Why are you fighting me, Ransik? We are on the same side! You know how I feel about you!"
"You feel nothing about anyone!" he answered. "I refuse to play your game any longer!"
"Well, I am sorry to hear you say that, honey," she said.
"Get Nadira out of that container!"
"I won't," The woman said.
Suddenly, the container where Nadira was, a large crystal tank filled with water, exploded. The explosion originated a chain reaction that made the other tanks that contained various mutants explode. Some of those mutants looked almost human, other looked dangerous; others weak and some others were just plain ugly.
"My babies!" The Mistress yelled and looked towards the stairs.
"My buddy here asked you to release his daughter," Jen said in a toneless voice.
"How dare you enter here? You are not worthy of entering my lab!"
'Shut up!' Jen ordered mentally and she did.
The mutants began to stir, and some of them, coincidentally the most dangerous looking ones, got to their feet. "I bet you wish you hadn't made all those tanks explode now," The mistress said.
Jen smiled evilly. "Why would I?" she asked. "I came here to destroy you all, and that's what I'm going to do."
The Mistress chuckled. "All by yourself? I'd like to see you try it!" she mocked.
Jen shrugged, and turned around, walking towards the stairs. 'Come and get me,' she ordered the mutants that were awake as she climbed the stairs. She got out of the hidden door and into the warehouse. She still had a few seconds to study her surroundings and make a plan.
"Jen? Is everything alright?" Lucas asked.
"Go," she said simply, adding a mental order to her words. "Get Alex out of here, and leave!"
She didn't like what she was going to do, but she had no choice. If she froze these mutants, if she let them get away or escape, then The Mistress would gather them all again and attack in almost no time. If she wanted to stop her, she was going to have to break the rules of the Time Force and kill these mutants.
The others took Alex outside and Jen closed the door just in time, because the mutants started to pour out of the hidden door right at that moment. She focused all her mind on them, so she could attack them more than one at a time. She sent a weak looking one flying against some tubes and heard its skull crush.
She then wrapped some chains that hung from the ceiling around the throats of two strong looking ones and strangled them, while she fought physically to keep the others away from her.
She crushed a couple of human looking ones with some really heavy boxes it took her a lot of focus to move. Again she heard the bones crush. She knew those sounds were going to stay in her nightmares, like the noises the wolves made. She hit three of them with a giant hook used to lift the boxes. They crashed against the walls.
Soon Jen realized there were too many of them, there were more than she had expected and they grew stronger, as she grew weaker. She had a headache. She had never used her power for so long and with such strength. She was tired and hurt and the mutants were just too many.
******************
The Mistress grabbed two syringes from a cabinet and approached Ransik from behind. He was distracted, waking Nadira up, and checking if she was okay.
"I'm sorry we had to do this the hard way, Ransik, my dear," she whispered, and plunged the needle deep into Ransik's neck.
He was stunned for a few seconds, during which time the woman injected Nadira. Then she approached the main computer and started to run a program.
"Come, we have to get out of here," she ordered Nadira and Ransik, who followed her. "It will be a fresh start for us."
********************
Just when Jen was about to give up, she received a thought. I have to get out of here, before the whole place blows up. It came from The Mistress.
The lab was in self-destruct mode and she was escaping through a back door. Jen ran to the door and opened it, holding the mutants back with her mind control powers and got out, bolting the door behind her. She had barely gotten a few feet away from the building, when it blew up, killing all the mutants inside, turning them into a giant fireball.
For a few seconds, she and the other rangers were stunned, looking at the flames.
********************
The Mistress looked at the fire, tears filling her eyes. "One of these days, Jennifer Scotts, One of these days."
*******************
Jen snapped back to reality and ran towards the back of the building, focusing on The Mistress, trying to stop her.
Alex, now completely healed by his friends, ran behind her. "Jen, wait up!" he called her.
"Alex, go back," she said. "This will get messy; I don't want you to."
"I know who she is," he said simply, looking into Jen's eyes. "I want to stop her as much as you do."
"So do we," called Katie who had run after Alex, followed by Trip and Lucas. Jen nodded to them all and they ran side by side, meeting The Mistress when she was getting into a car. Jen forced her away from it.
"What else do you want?" The Mistress asked tiredly. "You have already killed all my children."
"I want to bring you to justice," Jen said.
"And I want answers," Alex said. "Mom."
"What was that?" The Mistress asked.
"I know it's you," he said. "Nobody but you has ever called Jen farm girl."
"She does come from a farm, doesn't she? It's not really that hard to figure out what to call her," The Mistress answered hurriedly.
"Mom, I know it's you," he said simply. "Tell me, why are you doing this?"
"Doing what?" she asked. "I am not your mother," she insisted.
Alex blinked slowly, and then looked at her, his face expressionless. "Mom, what did she do to you? Why do you hate her so much?"
"She.She." She seemed to be straining to come up with an answer. "Alexander," she finally said, admitting her true identity. "I had so many plans for you, you are one of my most beautiful creations, how could you think I would let you mix such perfect DNA with the DNA of that farm girl, with God knows what failures in her genes?"
"You don't like her because she wasn't engineered?"
"OF COURSE!!" the woman said. "Alexander, I'm a genetics engineer, I appreciate perfected DNA, and I hope my children marry people as well designed and perfect as they are," she explained.
"I can't believe this," Alex said sadly.
"Is what Ransik told me true?" Jen asked softly. "That you sent Nadira to him with Tatag, because you didn't want anybody to know..."
"Yes," she admitted. "I did, because it was a dangerous procedure, and many people were after her, and after her father, among them my own husband and my own child. Oh, if only Nadira knew all the plans I had for her."
"What plans? Selling her story to the newspapers?" she asked bitterly.
"Newspapers? No, if I hadn't trusted the wrong person, nobody would have known that Nadira was a mutant for many, many years. I wanted to raise her myself, with her brother," she said, pointing at Alex. "I wanted to be a mother for her, a true mother, and give her a true family away from her father and his crimes, away from the prejudices that exist towards mutants. I wanted her to be the daughter my husband never gave me."
"Because you always told him you wanted a boy," Alex said bitterly, his cheek showing the trail of a single bitter tear that had ran down it.
"Alexander," The Mistress said, drying his cheek. "Don't be jealous now, it's not proper for a gentleman."
"I'm not jealous," he said, his voice showing how he felt. "I'm just hurt. You lied to me for such a long time."
"And she's not done, yet," Jen said, her gaze lost into The Mistress's gaze. "Aren't you going to tell him the truth about you and Ransik?"
"What about her and Ransik?" Alex asked.
"He was my lover," The Mistress admitted. "Nadira is my daughter, from the mutant point of view, and from the human point of view."
"You cheated on Dad with Ransik? How could you?"
"Like I said, I appreciate good DNA, and Ransik is one of the most perfect mutants ever created, he is so powerful, and he was so gorgeous."
"Gorgeous?" Katie asked.
"He was, when he was first created," The Mistress explained. "He was incredibly handsome, but he was too powerful and too unstable, his DNA didn't hold tight for very long and began to react. The result was the monster you had to fight."
"So, powerful and cute don't mix?"
"Didn't mix by the time Ransik was created. They do now."
"Really?" Alex asked.
"Yes, Nadira is a great example of that."
"Nadira?" Lucas asked. They all looked at The Mistress with disbelief. Nadira was one of the weakest mutants they had ever met.
"Yes, you have never met the real Nadira, the true Nadira with all her power unlocked."
"And something tells me we don't want to," Lucas said.
"Why would you?" The Mistress asked. Suddenly, the Rangers heard a blast and fell face first to the floor, when it hit them from behind. Ransik walked towards The Mistress from behind the Rangers and stood next to her. Nadira was walking behind Ransik, and turned towards the Rangers, her eyes black, and lifeless.
She raised her hand and her nails grew to the size of swords as they always did, but this time they glowed pink, brightly. She swung her hand towards them and a blast of energy made its way towards them. It took all of Jen's focus to change its route and make it hit the burning building, provoking another explosion.
Ransik and Nadira got into the car, and The Mistress followed them. Ransik tried to start the car but he couldn't. He tried several times and failed.
"What's going on?" The Mistress asked.
You are not going anywhere, Jen told her mentally.
"What?" The Mistress asked in disbelief, looking at the woman lying on the floor, barely breathing. "This has got to be a joke."
It's not a joke, Jen assured her, lifting the car from the floor. You have done many horrible things, and you have to pay for them.
"This is impossible, you can't be this powerful!" The fear escaped her through her voice. She breathed hard and looked around, at Ransik and Nadira, looking for answers.
What's wrong? The almighty Mistress is afraid of a simple, insignificant farm girl? Jen asked, her voice tainted with bitter mockery. I don't believe it!
"That's enough!" The Mistress said. "Kill her!!" she ordered Ransik, and he nodded. He pointed at her and shot an energy ball that hit the building.
"What the hell is wrong with you?"
Are you ready to pay for all the abominations you have done in your life?
"Not yet!" was her answer, and a single gunshot was heard above the roar of the flames. The car fell to the ground, started and sped away. The Mistress had escaped.
*******************
The reinforcements Time Force had sent and the firemen got to the scene and found all five Rangers lying on the ground unconscious. Jennifer Scotts had a gunshot wound in her back, and was bleeding considerably, so she was the first one the paramedics took to the hospital. Her chances of surviving were lower than the rest.
"Hang on tight, Captain, you'll be alright," one of the paramedics told her.
*******************
Jen stood by the beach, looking at the ocean. She felt a pair of strong arms wrap around her.
"What's on your mind?" Alex asked her, whispering the words directly in her ear.
"She escaped. I let her get away," she answered.
"You did everything you could," he told her, holding her hand tight.
"I guess all we have to do now is plan the wedding, and hope she doesn't come back."
"What will happen if she does?"
"We'll get her."
"What happens if we can't?" he asked further.
"Who cares?" she answered, turning to kiss him. "The only thing that matters is that in the end, we are together. She lost, because she couldn't keep us apart."
"That's right" he said, smiling. He looked at the ocean, his eyes reflecting the movement of the waves. "From now on, it's you and me."
"Forever," she completed, smiling.
*******************
"Do you think she will come back?" Katie asked Alex.
"As soon as she can, she will," he answered.
"I wasn't talking about The Mistress," she said.
"Neither was I."
The End.
